Surround Them With Words
Or, Go Away! I'm Reading! (Day 91)
In the basement of the house where I grew up, my father had installed three tall, pull-out shelving systems on wheels under the stairs. (At least I assume he installed them, they may have come with the house.)
One was used for kitchen and cooking things, like baking pans, rolling pins and flour sifters.
One was used for supplies, like toilet paper, foil, plastic wrap, light bulbs, soap and so forth.
But the third one, the one on the far end, was the most interesting to me. That one was full of two things; souvenirs my mother stored from her many travels.
And books.
Make no mistake, my parents were not classically trained readers. That pull-out was jam packed with Reader’s Digest Condensed Novels, my dad’s outdoors magazines and handbooks, some travel guides and a whole lot of popular fiction of the day. It was in that dusty old, moldy pull-out that I discovered Slaughterhouse 5, The Godfather, and The Spy Who Came in From the Cold. It was where I first realized that the James Bond movies came from books. Same as Amityville Horror. I still have my parents’ faded, falling apart copy of Catch-22.
Also, Eric Van Lustbader. Heavens! Ninjas and Sex! Utterly mind-blowing to middle-school me huddled up under the stairs reading as fast as I could so my parents wouldn’t realize I had found their “secret” stash of saucy books.
I think about this under-the-stair pull-out a lot in my life these days, whether at my job at the library, writing this journal you’re reading or watching my own daughter blossom into a reader. I wonder what I would be - who I would be - if those messy, disheveled paperbacks didn’t exist in my life when I was growing up.
A couple days ago, I asked some readers to send me a book shelfie and a few actually did! I’ll post them below. Having books in one’s home feels important. Maybe the most important.
There is certainly no indication in my childhood as far as my parents knew that I would make my living and spend my life trading in the written word. My dad always wanted me to be an accountant.
How could they have known how much influence that big drawer in the basement and their very own reading habits eventually had on me. Now imagine what kind of influence books in your home, being active readers for your kids, can have on them if you’re deliberate about it; if you read with them, if you tell stories, if you encourage their word addiction.
Even if they end up becoming an accountant (not that there’s anything wrong with that) I bet they’ll be a better accountant because they’re a good reader. Surround kids with words. Let them taste test books. It won’t hurt. I promise!
My father was the accountant. My mother, the nurse, was the voracious reader. I still remember the day they cleared off one of the bottom shelves of the bookshelf in the living room and told me it was mine! I was one of maybe two kids in my kindergarten class who could read before I started school. Several of the upper shelves contained Readers Digest Condensed Books, as they were inexpensive. The school and village libraries were my happy places. My current read is a book called The White Mountain by this Dan Szczesny guy. You may have heard of it? It’s pretty decent. 😊
Growing up around books, no matter what kind, can make a huge difference. As a child, I loved the "funnies" in the newspaper and had several books of "Garfield," "Peanuts," and "Calvin and Hobbes." When I was a teenager, my mom read a lot of Christian fiction, and since that's what was around the house, I read that, too. While grieving, I've read a lot of magazines. None of that is what you'd call "classically trained" or impressive, but at least I was/am reading. My grandmother told me that my grandfather's parents didn't have many books around, and he was never much of a reader. So, I believe that what you read doesn't matter as much as the fact that you are reading.