Bibliophile

At night, we stretch out on the bed for one of the few enduring rituals. Three books, three songs. For nearly five years, we have followed this same map to creep our way into night’s inner sanctum. Daddy’s house may have its own traditions now; I do not ask. For us, no matter the time zone in which we lay our heads, this is what Bug and Mommy do before bed.

Last night, we had finished up the first two picture books and Bug was reaching for the third. “Which one will it be?” He grinned sideways at me. He already clasped a Dr. Seuss against his chest.

“Maybe Wizard of Oz?” I said. “Or. . . Alice in Wonderland?”

Bug tilted the book down for a glance. “You’re teasing. We don’t have Alice in Wonderland.”

“Yes, we do. Right there, on the shelf. We have lots of big kid books.”

Dropping the Dr. Seuss and scooting off the bed, Bug made his way to the same bookcases that have stared him down for more than a year. He itched a mosquito bite on his tanned arm as he stood contemplating the rainbow splashed across his wall.

My son’s bookcases house an eclectic mix of titles. We live in the two spare rooms, after all, so the meager remains of my personal library have spilled over onto my kid’s shelves. Yet, the diversity is as much by design by necessity. Over the years, I have peppered his Little Critter and Beatrix Potter collection with young adult novels, non-fiction titles, and a random assortment of what Bug refers to as “grown up books.” 

“Is this Harry Potter?”

I grinned. All seven books have lived at eye-level since the kid could first stand up. It has taken him this long to notice. “Sure is,” I sighed. “I don’t know, though. They are big kid books. No pictures. Do you think you can handle it?”

He grabbed the spine marked with a number one and puffed out his chest. “I have read big kid books before. I can handle it!”

He crawled back onto the bed and we took in the cover’s busy dazzle. “You know, kiddo, your daddy and I read this book at bedtime together, just like this.”

“You did?”

“Yep. Long before you were born.  We would read out loud in bed to each other, one chapter a night. We took turns. We read almost the whole series, just like that.” I opened the book and began.

Bug twisted and wiggled next to me, interrupting at irregular intervals for clarification. “When is Harry Potter going to come?” Kick, fidget. “What is all this talking?”

Back to the page, back to the tale, I guided my son’s wandering attention. I offered to stop but he insisted we continue. The story’s music soon pulled us in. Immersed, my voice found each character’s unique lyric. Bug’s body echoed the pace of the story’s deepening breath.  The ensemble settled into its rhythm there on the bottom bunk.

At last, the final line of chapter one sang out. “To Harry Potter – The boy who lived!” I smiled and snapped the book closed. Bug let out a shriek and burst into tears.

“I want more! More Harry Potter! Please, Mommy, just one more chapter! Please!”

“Tomorrow is the weekend, Baby. We can read two chapters if you want.”

“Can we read three chapters?” He rubbed his fist into his teary eyes. “Or four?”

I laughed and hugged him close. “We can read all weekend if you want.” I began to sing. In my arms, Bug whimpered his way to sleep.

What a haunting chord, this pride at witnessing my child’s righteous despair. My son cries out his disappointment at losing his nourishment. What sustains him now is not me; it exists behind garden doors to which I can only offer a key.  These tears are evidence of his becoming a literate boy. He is not just learning to read. He is learning to love to read.  At last, he hungers for the things he needs to thrive beyond the reach of this embrace.

Reconstituted

From the book about witches slips an ad

For packets of instant amphibian:

Just add water.

You pause to consider.

“Only a mommy frog can make a frog,” I explain.

“But who makes the mommy frog?” You ask.

“Her mommy, of course.”

You show mercy and fold the ad away,

Leaving for another day inquiries into

The conception of the primal polliwog.

Explanations about origins are all speculation

But a parent must try

To crumble creation

Into bites that can satisfy a child.

Everything here, every planet, moon and sun

Every bit of matter that would ever be

Every single molecule of you and me

Was all curled inside one single seed

Drifting in the bottomless black sky.

When it blew, the clay of us

Hurtled aflame through nothing

To alight on one reaching edge

And ride.

Galaxies brush crumbs from their knees

And here you are, next to me,

The crystal dust of Saturn's rings.

You are made of stars.

 

That ancient, flaming rain made the first mommy frog,

Her eggs

Her hunger

And the very question of beginnings

Taking shape in your mind.

Instant life, indeed.

Powder, water, a single flash of magic

And the long breath

Of anticipation

As you see what the spell begets.

Read This Book

This graphics-rich collaboration by three Gen X writers is like Jon Stewart’s America for the Y.A. set. But unlike Stewart’s readers — at least theoretically — the intended audience for “Americapedia” still needs to learn the basics of the American Revolution (“America Unfriends Great Britain”). So while the book holds no shortage of attitude and satire, it also imparts an impressive array of historical substance and even a degree of earnestness and patriotism, complete with an appendix on civic action for teenagers.      

 - Pamela Paul's review of Americapedia in The New York Times Sunday Book Review

The 6^th graders owned the back of the class. We were the spillover kids, one handful too many to squeeze into overcrowded rooms up the hall. To accommodate our odd numbers, the school shoved a bank of desks together in the 5th grade pod. The poor instructor had probably won Teacher of the Year the previous spring. Her prize for her excellence was a group of rowdy pre-adolescents gumming up the works in her class.

Because we were older and fewer, our teacher's main concern was keeping us out of trouble so she could teach her little ducklings. If she left us to our own devices for more than ten minutes, she would have a Lord of the Flies situation on her hands. Andy and I, seated across the island of desks from each other, did not help the situation. We irritated the spit out of each other. He razzed me until I was close to tears, probably because I was a hyper-sensitive dope and what's more fun than getting a rise out of a weepy pre-teen girl? I undoubtedly fumbled around for come-backs, and maybe even managed to bruise a remote corner of his ego with my screechy insults.

Our teacher tried to keep the lot of us out of trouble by throwing heaps of busy-work our way. Those wide-ruled, black-and-white composition books were one tool for classroom management. The assignments were the usual elementary school pablum – “What I Did on my Summer Vacation.” To kill time, we read our entries out loud to each other.

Bo-o-oring.

Until Andy got going. I’m sure I wasn’t the only one who loved his stories most of all. Most days, I would have given anything to live on a different planet than that boy. But Andy's stories. . . well. They made me want to come back for a visit.

Memory fuzzes out after a couple of decades. The narratives might have involved the delicious comeuppance of the class bully. Maybe interplanetary hijinks between the cafeteria lady and the gym teacher. Who knows? All I remember were that his pieces were short, dangerous (the teacher was covering fractions with the toddlers up front, after all), and hysterically funny to an audience of 11-year-olds. Andy only needed a No. 2 pencil and half a blank page to make his peers titter and squirm in delight.

One brief moment in one otherwise indistinct day still blazes in my recollection. Snickering with my classmates as Andy read one of his naughty tales, a Mack truck plowed into me. I stopped laughing and reeled with a sudden realization. Andy had written it. This kid had taken a pencil and just written down a story from inside his own brain!

You would think this would not be such a revelation to a child raised by bibliophiles. My house had no television in it until I was ten years old. We owned records and art supplies and a big back yard, but what we collected in the greatest abundance was books. Mountains of books. Teetering, sagging shelves full of books.  From my earliest years, I had a voracious appetite for all those words. My father did not sit at the edge of my sister’s and my bunk bed and read Dr. Seuss. No, he read us Mark Twain. Charles Dickens. Victor Hugo. Seriously.  My childhood villain was Javert, not Boss Hogg.

Somehow, I had missed a key point in all that reading. A person, a real human person, had cut every one of my beloved characters from the cloth of imagination. Someone had written those stories.

Someone like Andy.

Why not someone like me?

The glare of this one single flashpoint from over 25 years ago still makes me blink. That day, I started writing. Really writing. Not just writing the dreary assignments doled out by an overworked and underpaid teacher, but building narratives. Playing with language. Practicing the craft.

I was eons behind Andy in both native talent and training hours logged. But I began then, at the unruly back end of a crowded classroom. I began to write.

As for Andy? He never stopped.

Next week, you can order Andisheh Nouraee's first book. Americapedia: Taking the Dumb out of Freedom, is launching on July 19th. That clever kid is one of three authors of this smart, satire-rich take on American politics and history. In the decades since he left those composition books behind, the fella’s wit has only grown sharper and his writing more polished.

And he still knows how to make every grinning idiot in the room squirm.

Read this book. Remember someone very real wrote it. Raise your glass – and your pencil – to that deserving guy.  Then go out and buy a few copies for your friends. Buy some for your enemies, too. You never know when you might learn something from them.

Category: Self-Help

Sacred Marriage. Vixen Diaries. Love Yourself First. Live Juicy. A wall of titles, towering, closing in. Each one of these books, a brick pressing in, right against the gut. I had approached this section ("Self-Improvement?" Holy Toledo!) seeking something about. . . what? Gratitude and appreciation? Clearing away the debris? Getting eight hours of sleep?

This section of the books store has always been my secret indulgence. While I pretend I am a history buff and will plow through a biography of Jonas Salk just because it matters, the shelves I visit when craving comfort food offer a thousand ways to mend ragged love and ease stiff perception. By following the training regimens of gurus and quacks, I seek escape from the commonplace. A simple set of exercises has the power to give each moment a jolt of clarity. Perhaps by following this five-step plan or repeating that mantra, I will unearth my calling, my companion, my faith? When I stumble across a new title on mindfulness or forgiveness, my mouth waters. What new practice shall I sink my teeth into today? How can I learn to look up and discover my way?

But now. Gads. Now that the core relationships of my life are in a jumble and I need the help more than ever, all I experience as I approach this wailing wall is sheer vertigo. Confession and prayer, careful attention to each intimate detail. . . these tasks are about as compelling as scaling a rock-face teeming with snakes. I cannot, physically cannot step within arm's length of the shelves. I stand at a safe-ish distance, assessing the spines. Each seems more coolly dangerous than the last. Relationship Rescue. Collaborative Divorce.

It appears the vast array of options for reflection and recovery is no longer a delicious smorgasbord of self-discovery. Whatever exists between those blessedly closed covers suddenly seems too much. Too much self-absorption, too much spiraling diagnosis. Too much savoring the flavor of one's own cud. Just Too. Damned. Much.

Because I cannot take one step closer, I back away, reeling, and spin into another aisle. Cookbooks, travel guides, coffee-table volumes of English gardens and lightning storms. What other skills shall I develop instead? This is the habit for a gal like me. Allow someone else to give me a prompt, a purpose, a compass point. Seek and absorb. But what of the path I have already cleared away? What of the practices I have spent the better part of three decades learning to cultivate?

I stop. Catch my breath. Enough, lady. You know where to go. It's really not so hard one you just say yes. Yes, I know my heart and I know my mind. These two are my own trusty guides.

They nudge my feet in the direction of the stationery section. Bound books. Blank parchment. There, I find the one I seek. A flashy spiral filled with lined sheets, a slick chick in a bikini on the cover sipping a martini. I pay my $10 -- too much for blank pages, but not for the lease -- and slip over to the cozy chairs to inhabit the empty rooms between the college rule. One word at a time, I fill them. This is my own text. My own story. A self-improvement section crafted by these hands.

As I begin to write, a man near me strikes up a conversation. Following a health scare, he has begun to keep a journal for the first time in his life. "What do you say in those things?" He asks, gesturing towards my book. We talk of writing whatever pulls us to the page. He tells his story about traveling the world for work, then retiring with just enough in the bank to buy into a ranch in Colorado. There, the waiting horses, the endless acres. I listen. He is hungry for an ear. I feed him mine. Little does he know, I am filling my own belly with crumbs of adventures I have not yet imagined. My journal only contains four lines, but it is fat with the nourishment I came in seeking. Before I go, I remind the fella to keep writing. He tells me the same.

It is a blessing to know simple things. Make poetry. Share bread. It is not so very hard to love this big old world when returning to what is already known. They say the only way to learn how to write is to write. Perhaps the only way to find one's way is to take a step.

Like You

Like you I

love love, life, the sweet smell

of things, the sky-blue

landscape of January days.

And my blood boils up

and I laugh through eyes

that have known the buds of tears.

I believe the world is beautiful

and the poetry, like bread, is for everyone.

And that my veins don't end in me

but in the unanimous blood

of those who struggle for life,

love,

little things,

landscape and bread,

the poetry of everyone.

- Roque Dalton