Indiana summers can be killingly humid. I decided I would start reading all night long and sleep through the hottest part of the day - except when my mother decided I needed to be part of the land of the living.
http://www.rustedmoonoutfitters.com/summer
One of my favorite things to do was lay out to get a tan, and read. Yep, that's right we used to do that sort of thing before tanning beds. Really, I liked the reading better than the laying in the hot sun. I got bored, my mind wondered and raced, I thought of a million different things to do or write. Reading made me settle down enough to get some sun. I am still the same way. I would rather be doing the thing than pretending to do the thing. I would rather be in a canoe than at a rowing machine, rather bike than in a spinning class, go hiking in the sun dappled woods along hilly trails instead of on the stair master watching the t.v. mounted on the wall with no sound but subtitles provided. I like the REAL, not the facsimile.
Reading created a reality in my mind that made it SEEM real. I could - can - get so in depth in a book that I am right there with the author. I am the character. I can taste and smell, hear and feel the surroundings, the setting of the book. But, I could shut the cover and instantly be brought back to the reflective tanning blanket and sweat laying on my fed up skin.
Then I decided to bring out my note book and pen to take notes on things I wanted to study more in depth later. When I started coming back in with blue pen ink smeared into my sweat and baby oil covered, grass stained body I decided I just was not made to have the tropical tan to look like a healthy young woman. I wanted to take my book and note pad and pencils into the woods and hike and think and write. I wanted to drag my borrowed books from the library into the cool woods and lean against a tree and read and read and read. I wanted to be surrounded by the woods and earth, the fields and cliffs, and thickets and hollows and hills - all the things that Frost and Thoreau and e.e. cummings, and Yeats and James Joyce and Kavanagh and George William Russell wrote about and around.
Something like this went on in my young mind in the woods on Garrison Creek:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XxhivPXeRN0&list=PL47989F9292194E8D
I read fiction and poems, classics and obscure scribblings.
I devoted my whole love to writers who had a different accent, but ones so very close to what I knew. Irish and Scottish, German and Russian, Norse and Icelandic and Dutch. Appalachian and U.S. Southern.
http://digitallibrary.imcpl.org/cdm/singleitem/collection/riley/id/4
Looking back this was a feat. My local little library supplied all these things. There was no internet to GOOGLE anything on. I liked it better then.
But, I knew that was my season for selfishness. I learned from my sister and sister-in-law becoming first time working mothers. I learned from my new nephew and niece. I knew somewhere in my future I would become a wife and mother, possibly a business woman, surely a woman with a career away from home 8 hours a day. How would I, how COULD I indulge my addiction to fiction once this other person came into being? No, this was my selfish time and I did not have an ounce of guilt retreating to my hiding places on the farm to explore from someone else's perspective till the day came when I could break away and venture into the world in God knows what adventure or direction.
BUT, I would not even had that spark of where to read had it not been for Mr. Hopkins. I was mired in the technical, the prescribed, the assigned. He took young minds and dared us to read what ever the heck we wanted to - just report back on it to him, and to a lesser degree the class. He wanted to really get to know who we were from our inner workings of our minds. He did not really grade so hard on punctuation and grammar until the second semester. He just wanted to reach us in a way we had not been reached before. Push us into that first step of self responsibility for who we would become in a few short years.
I was tired of stories that explored the earth. I wanted to explore the mind. I wanted to explore other's minds. I wanted to know what others thought about this world. I wanted ones who had lived to tell me. I wanted those who had had troubles and careers and failures and successes and life and death pass their way. I was ready for more meaty bites of literature.
So on came the pensmiths that shaped me in one way or another:
Irene Hunt
George Orwell
Ray Bradbury
Ayn Rand
James Agee
Upton Sinclair
Eugene O'Neill
John Steinbeck
J.R.R. Tolkein (No one can EVER convince me that any of the recent movie adaptations of his books are any where NEAR the enthrallment of a 14 year old girl reading these for the first time!)
My list can go on and on and on.....here, just look at this link and it will just give you the tiniest taste.
By the end of the summer my mind was reeling. I did not know what to make of this world that was out there. I knew it was changing too. I knew if I was to survive I needed to learn quite a few things about life before I could be considered grown. I suddenly wanted to be a little girl again playing kick ball with the rest of the kids at Orange School out by the well house at lunch recess. I wanted to sit on my favorite rock by the cow pasture fence and read to the cows once again. The cows had been sold. We were not farmers any more. My outer world was changing as fast as my inner one was.
I was ready to get back to the safe routine that school provided in the fall, or I thought I was.
Suddenly, when I was told something I knew to be false - I was outraged. Not just perplexed, outraged. How could someone who professed to be doing something for the good of every one else tell such untruths? The t.v., the News, the Papers, the Magazines, the Administration, the Government, the Politicians, the TEACHERS?!
Was I a budding conspiracy theorist? Or was I learning to see through the b.s.? Perhaps it was a tiny bit of the first and a large bit of the second.
I learned soon enough, though that the only ones that wanted to debate the issue with a 14 year old were at my home. (I trusted that somewhere there was someone, but I knew it was not to be where I was then.) I did not have much in common with my friends of my youth or the new ones I had tried to make in the past 2 years. I learned that I was in more suitable company with folks older than I. I learned to listen to what they said, process it through what I knew and what I thought and then carefully ask questions about why and how.
I suddenly despised all teenagers, including myself. I wanted to grow older and not be a teen. I wanted to have wisdom, knowledge, and skills. I wanted to be of worth not just taking up space and having social dramas.
http://www.zap2it.com/news/pictures/zap-hollywood-celebrates-teen-read-week-20121016-6,0,4874819.photo
I distanced myself. I wanted to hole up somewhere for a few years learn and do and master and come out like a butterfly - no not a butterfly, like a moth- sturdy and full of work to be done. Little did I remember that moths are seen as destructive to humans. Their work is not what WE want done. We want the fabric of our society to weave nicely and mesh just so. The moth likes to nibble and nibble and nibble away and expose the weakness of the weft and warp.
I will continue "Librarians I Have Loved" in Part
-Suzanna
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