Bookworm!

December 4, 2008

When I was at Mom and Dad’s house over the Thanksgiving holiday, Jodie and my niece Alicia were playing downstairs in my brothers' old bedroom. It’s now a playroom, and they started unearthing some of the old toys my sisters and I used to play with. They found Mr. Mooney and brought him upstairs. “Mr. Mooney” is a yellow giraffe about 2’ high that Mom made for Sabrina & Melissa when they were kids. She made a “Tuffy the Tooth” for me, a red elephant with pink ears for Elaine, and there’s a purple elephant with yellow ears she said Tim made (actually I thought SHE made it for HIM).

That sparked my memory reserves, and I went downstairs to see what I could find too. I got to searching the wooden bookshelf that my dad made many moons ago. I was a bookworm in my younger years. I used to read constantly. One of those books I read avidly was Where the Red Fern Grows, and I thought it might be there. It wasn’t, but I did find oodles of other old books that I used to read.

Where The Lilies Bloom, about Mary Call Luther and her siblings fending for themselves in the hills of Appalachia after their father passed away. There was a made-for-TV movie about it.

It Must be Love ‘Cause I Feel so Dumb was an After-School Special. I remember ordering this one from a Scholastic Book Club in fifth grade. Quiet, awkward Erik falls for the pretty, popular cheerleader Lisa, and chases her for weeks before realizing that his best gal-pal Cathy, is who he should be with.

I found an “Alfred Hitchcock/Three Investigators” book that I got at a neighbor’s yard sale. I found some of my old “I Can Read” books from the elementary school years, including one I’d forgotten all about: The Secret Three. Two young boys live on a beach and form a club with a third boy who lives on an island where his dad keeps the lighthouse. They invent their own secret code and communicate via messages in a bottle.

I found my “Waltons” book (Good night, John-Boy), and my “Welcome Back Kotter” books (Up your nose with a rubber hose), that I read in fourth or fifth grade. Oh, and The Shy Stegosaurus of Cricket Creek, a story I read in third grade about this young brother and sister who live in the desert of New Mexico (or Arizona?), and discover a still-living stegosaurus that talks to them. The grownups are archaeologists who are unearthing old dinosaur bones, and the stegosaurus gets rather upset that they are digging up his ancestors’ graves.

I was a bookworm alright. Anytime I finished my classwork at school, I had my nose in a book. Always. In middle school my pages of choice became “Star Trek” books, and in high school I began reading the classics -- Ethan Frome, 1984, The Member of the Wedding, Gone With the Wind. Oh, and how could I forget all those “Little House” books I read in elementary and middle school? Or the “Wizard of Oz” series?

I even read some of my brothers’ paperbacks, which were WAY too adult for me at the time. My brothers are nearly a decade older than me! They graduated from high school before I was even in middle school. What on earth was I doing reading books with demonic or sexual content at age 15?!

At least I was reading. What happened? Why did I quit reading, up until recently, anyway? Oh yeah, life happened. I grew up, became an adult, started working, bought a car, got married, had a child. Who has time to read while paying bills or changing diapers?

It wasn’t just life that happened, REALITY happened. It seemed senseless, to me, to indulge my thoughts in someone else’s dream, fantasy, imagination. Those fantasies had nothing to do with the real stresses and issues I was dealing with as an adult. Fiction was entertaining, but worlds away from real life.

Now though, in my forties, I’m rediscovering the bookworm in me. That child who spent nearly every spare minute reading a book, is still there. She was just dormant for a couple decades!