My Constant

As we cruised past our 46th wedding anniversary, I have been thinking about constants.  I met my better person than me when I was 17.  In September, that will be a 50 year friendship. My oldest ongoing relationship is actually with reading.  (No, it's not writing.  I didn't start to write until I was 59.)

I started reading when I was five.  What spurred me to really practice the skill was an event which happened one morning in the 'Robin' Circle - yes, those really existed.  This is one of my first memories which has a negative emotion attached to it:  Embarrassment.  About one-fourth of the class is sitting in the circle of little chairs reading sentences out loud to the teacher.  My little five year old self is sitting there with my Dick, Jane & Spot reader.  I'd always done well in this exercise, and I'd never needed the teacher's help with any of the words in MY sentence. That is until the word 'open' appeared.  It was my first experience with 'going blank'.  I just couldn't sound out the word.  It was embarrassing to have the teacher prompt me to sound out, then hint, and finally tell me.  I was MORTIFIED.

To avoid that dire humiliation again, I started to practice my reading at every opportunity.  Within a few months, Dick, Jane and Spot were in my rear window eating dust.  My lifelong love had been born.  This was also my first lesson that for every bad thing which happens to you, there's always some type of silver lining attached.  While I'm generally a happy person, I think learning this life lesson very early shaped my personality.

I've been haunting libraries since I was about six.  The Florence Park Branch of the Tulsa Public Library system was one-half block from my mother's favorite grocery store.  We always killed two birds with one stone every single week.  My stack of checked out books grew and grew as I aged.  I was a fast, and voracious reader.  By the time I was 10, I'd read all the kid chapter books Florence Park had in the collection.  The Five Little Peppers come to mind, along with the proverbial Nancy Drew and all those other serial chapter books for children. Cherry Ames, Visiting Nurse.  Old Cherry was an early favorite mainly because she was a brunette,  but she was really a rule following drip who quickly bored me.  I mowed through all the biographies on the school library shelves.

Thanks to Cherry, I wandered into the adult fiction stacks at old Florence Park and started looking around.  I found historical, and often semi-biographical fiction - hello, Anya Seton.  I quickly discovered not all writers held my attention equally.  It was a revelation some writers were better than others.  Authors like Seton predisposed me to love history because I learned so much of it in those exciting novels with heroic women as main characters who my prepubescent self admired.  Then, I found the Gothic, romantic mysteries, again starring plucky females, which led to reading regular mysteries.

When I say 'find', I mean that literally.  I would wander up and down the fiction stacks waiting for some book on the shelf to call to me.  (I still do that to this day.)  I was never sure (and still don't know) what would prompt me to pick up and peruse a book,  and you had to peruse in those days because there was no nifty jacket with blurb.  The clear plastic covering a book jacket which is glued to a library book is newfangled.  Old style library books were bound in this pebbly hard plastic meant to mimic the worst leather you can possibly imagine. However, these bindings survived cigarettes, liquids of all types from Dr. Pepper to bourbon, fluids emitted from children, food oozings, and the Apocalypse, if needed.  These were sturdy. Sometimes you still see these books at Goodwill.  They look exactly the same as the day they were bound.

Around age twelve I got bored with my historical fiction and mysteries.  At this point, I was reading ten adult books each week!   I learned there was something called a 'best seller list', and I found the Reader's Digest Condensed Books thanks to the subscription I had to the Reader's Digest.  If you were a subscriber, you got the offer to subscribe to the Condensed Books Club which my parents popped for.  You got one volume of six condensed books in every season for a total of four books a year.  I met a number of really famous authors through these abominations, and was introduced to non-fiction writings of true stories.  I secretly still like reading these silly books, harking back to my twelve year old self who loved them.

My mother tumbled early a kid who could devour books the way I could shouldn't actually BUY books.  She was never too busy to take me to the library, and by the time I was fourteen there was a library branch I could ride to on my bicycle.  Just as I was getting restless again for more varied reading material, thanks to my Condensed Books subscription, I got on a mailing list for a company selling remaindered books.  A new world opened up.

The remaindered book company sent out a newspaper supplement in the mail twice a year. The supplement was the size of the glossy pages which wrap around today's grocery ads the mailman still sticks in your mailbox.  However, the remaindered books supplement was on newsprint and was around 50 front/back pages printed in 10 point type describing remaindered books for sale, both fiction and non-fiction.   There was a tantalizing blurb under each title which made every one seem like the best book EVER, and a lot of them were $.99 each with cheap shipping! I had money from birthdays, Christmas, and babysitting.  I could buy my very own books.  (Looking back, I'm sure my mother was so very thrilled.)  I bought my very first Dick Francis book for $.99 from one of those supplements, and I loved every book he wrote until his death in the 21st century.  That book is still on my shelf.

In my early teen years, my librarian aunt began steering my reading toward American fiction classics.  I read John Steinbeck, Sinclair Lewis, Thomas Wolfe, Willa Cather, Edna Ferber, Mark Twain, Raymond Chandler, Louisa Mae Alcott, James Fenimore Cooper and so forth. I found Moss Hart's autobiography in one of the remainder supplements which led me to George Kaufman which led me to the Algonquin round table and Dorothy Parker.  I read Dashiell Hammett, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and the English author Agatha Christie.  Along with Hammett, she was the basis of my love of mysteries, especially well written mysteries.   Books were to me what video/electronics are to teens today.  I went to school.  I went to church.  I did my chores.  And I read.  I read all the way through high school including on dates to high school basketball games.

My only bone to pick about college was I couldn't read for pleasure.  My college days were the era of read, take notes, and regurgitate answers from all the reading to essay questions. Answers were written by hand in ink in 'blue books'.  (Neatness counted!)   A typical required reading list for one of my college semesters could easily exceed thirty books over and above the 1000 page textbook. I had lots of catching up to do in my 'fun' reading post graduation.

I've never met a library I don't like.  My latest most enduring craze is audiobooks.  First, they were on cassettes, then on CD's, and now they are electronic.  I have eight books loaded on my ancient MP3 Rio Player (one of the first pieces of equipment which would interface with the library electronic system), and there are seven actual library books stacked beside my chair.

In retirement, I'm always listening to a book when I'm doing anything which doesn't require my mind to perform the action - ironing, cooking, cleaning, sewing, exercising, embroidering, and so forth.  Drake calls it 'being plugged in', and I know it sometimes exasperates him when I'm off in the 23rd century, or in the 1st century, or exploring the psyche of a character living in some fictional town.  One of the reasons I love to watch baseball on TV (or any sporting event) is I can read actual books at the same time.

Reading is not just a constant for me.  It's a comfort, a mind stretcher, and defines me to my core.  If you've lasted all the way thru this meandering blog, here's your lagnaippe:  (In New Orleans lingo, that means 'a little something extra'.)  These are some books which have impressed me lately:  Sarah's Quilt , by Nancy Turner.  Ready Player One by Ernest Cline.  Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng, and for you non-fiction readers, The Next America by Paul Taylor.  You can look up the blurbs for yourself.  You don't even need the book jacket in the 21st century.