I slid a book out from the stack; it stuck a little, sweaty from a few decades of storage. I ran my thumb over the numbered spine. The trim was still shiny, the words still embossed beautifully in gold, stamped on a bright pink stripe. I slid to the floor, cross-legged in a pile of old clothes and discarded winter gear, and I opened up the pages of my childhood.
There's no way for me to adequately explain how an hour of my afternoon just disappeared. As I turned the pages, it was like blowing the dust off volumes of memories from 40 years ago. Every page was familiar, from the pencil and ink drawings of nursery rhyme staples to the longer fables and myths...the pages were pristinely intact, though there were occasional blue crayon marks on some of them. The illustrations are magnificent; while I could not have pulled a one of them out of my memory a week ago, as my fingers paged past them, they became more than just pictures. It was an odd sensation, one I'm really struggling to describe. I could remember poring over them as a child, creating imaginary worlds beyond the words on the page. Some of them thrilled me, some of them scared me a little, and all of them are so deeply rooted in my long term memory that I found myself murmuring the words without looking and finishing verses that I didn't even realize I have memorized.
For a few minutes I felt like the layers of my hardened adulthood had been peeled back, and a sort of reaffirmation of my most authentic, earliest self became visible. I felt like I was glowing from the inside out, like the thread of innocence at the center of all of us was suddenly tangible and within reach. When we're five years old, we only know what we know. Once we reach 44, we are so far removed from that purity of self, it's impossible to remember what we felt, what we knew, or who we were before it got colored and influenced by who we became. But for an hour on Saturday afternoon I saw it again and this time I have four decades of wisdom to look back on it nostalgically.
Do you have any idea how many hours I spent reading these encyclopedias? Me either, but lots. Book after book, from Animal Kingdom to How Things Work, to World & Space and Make & Do, I had a tutorial for life that gave me a head start, not just on school, but on all the skills I was going to need eventually. I developed a pretty good vocabulary and became a fantastic speller, not to mention learning how to be still, thoughtful, and imaginative long before a teacher asked me to do so. I was probably a pretty weird kid; I remember my Kindergarten teacher Mrs. Hart asking us to tell about a place we would like to visit. While my classmates said things like Mt. Rushmore and Disneyland, I said "The Okefenokee Swamp! Did you know they have plants there that eat the flesh of bugs?" There was dead silence after that and a flustered Mrs. Hart said, "Oh my." I ate lunch by myself for the rest of the year, but I wished I could show them all the pages of the National Geographic book with full color photographs of Pitcher plants devouring insects in their luminous sticky green throats.
As I sat there, reminiscing about forgotten pages and pictures, it occurred to me - for me to know these pages as well as I still do, I must have spent hours upon hours reading them. I don't remember my parents making that mandatory; there was not a designated twenty minute reading time on my homework to check off. I had wide open afternoons and weekends, I had freedom to do whatever I wanted as long as I didn't leave the yard. But do you know what I didn't have? Constant entertainment. I didn't have a steady flow of friends in and out of my house, I didn't have video games or television really, except Saturday morning cartoons. I played outside, I harassed my brother at every opportunity, and I read books.
Somewhere into book four on Saturday, my teacher brain kicked back in. I love to read. I LOVE it. And how did I get this way? Because my parents made books available to me from the youngest possible age. They read to me sometimes, but mostly they just made them available and then they got out of the way. When I got bored, I read a book. They didn't sign me up for an activity, I didn't comb the neighborhood looking for someone to play with...it seemed like the easiest thing in the world was just to open a book and disappear for a little while. What a simple, simple time.
Don't get me wrong - since becoming a parent I have made time for play dates for my kids and the list of activities I sign them up to try borders on ridiculous. I love every single thing about every single one of them, so I'm not criticizing the decisions we make as parents to expose them to activity. I'm just reflecting a little on a precious commodity that I don't give myself enough credit for having. When we lived at the farm we had a very isolated, simple life, and it really served us well. We couldn't keep everything when we came to town, but I will say that we still don't have internet at our house for a reason. When we are home, my kids wander around looking for something to do, since a screen isn't readily available. One of mine reads voraciously, asking for book series after book series until I almost literally can't afford his reading habit. One is into sewing at the moment, as well as the fine art of nails and make-up. One especially prefers to paint - on canvas, on rocks - even on an old cello she scavenged from the discard pile at school and I couldn't be happier. I think they become their most creative selves when they have nothing at all to do.
I teach 10th graders now, and by the time they get to me, reading habits are pretty much locked. They read, or they don't. The best I can hope for is to expose them to great stories while I have them, and hope it catches on. But for all my friends who are just starting out on the parenting journey...if I had one thing I would make sure I did all over again, it would be to always have an endless supply of books on hand, and to have hours and hours of absolutely nothing to do.
