Check Out a Book

“Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.”

Robert Frost

I’ve always loved to read. My very earliest childhood memories include being tucked in bed while my dad sat beside my brother and me as he read aloud The Jungle Book or tales from Hans Christian Anderson. He could recite entire poems like “Abu Ben Adam” and “The Cremation of Sam McGee”—admittedly a fairly grisly tale for a kindergartner. But as a timid, introverted child who faced a new set of relationships every time my dad was transferred to another air base, stories were dependable, unchanging friends on whom I could rely when loneliness threatened to overtake me.

I learned to love libraries—although on military bases, libraries were often a storeroom in some barracks with shelves full of leftover books which airmen discarded because they didn’t want the extra weight when they were transferred. One memorable evening when I was about 12, my mom found me in my bedroom reading a well-used copy of James Michener’s Hawaii. She was taken aback. Hawaii was definitely not on any list approved for adolescent reading. She started to confiscate it, but when she realized I was more than ½ way through the thousand-page book, she sighed and said, “Never mind.” (Aside from the fascinating history of the complicated intersection of multiple cultures in our island  state, Hawaii increased my sex education exponentially!)

When I was fourteen, I actually got a job at library—a private one. About a mile down a country road from our officer’s housing in rural Michigan lived a WWII vet who had been hit by shrapnel and was paralyzed from the waist down. After the war, he had bought a few acres of land, and his neighbors helped him convert the huge garage on his property into an upholstery shop. Over the years, folks donated books for him to entertain himself, and those were the start of a makeshift library at one end of his workspace–with not just books, but all kinds of random items for check-out—fairy dust, dragon’s blood, witches’ cookbooks, etc.–all fantastic concoctions of the librarian’s wide reading, imagination, and love of kids. (My brother once checked out a trumpet. After two weeks of his experimenting with random non-melodies at odd hours of the day and night, the neighbors voted to have him return it—post haste.)

 I got paid $1 an hour to stamp books with their required return dates after school. I also popped corn over the fireplace for readers who curled up in easy chairs, and I helped the owner re-bury arrow heads he’d found in the mounds behind his orchard to be excavated by novice anthropology students at the local university.  When I first read The Once and Future King by T. H. White, I wondered if the author had ever visited our little library by the shores of Lake Michigan. His description of Merlin’s workshop bore an eerie similarity to the wonders on the shelves all around me as I worked.

Naturally, once I had children, I wanted to impart my love of books to them. Even today, for virtually every birthday and Christmas gift, a new book is included. Daughter #1 and I visit the Scholastic Book Fair each November ( spending a couple of hundred dollars) for the 30 to 35 books we send grandchildren and nieces and nephews.

Reading is a beloved pastime for all my children now, but it was ‘iffy’ with Son #6. He resisted reading voluntarily and ignored the books I showered on him for celebratory days–until I gave him a little-known first novel by a British single mom titled The Sorcerer’s Stone. She’d had some trouble getting it published, but I ran across it at one of our forays to the Scholastic Book Fair. Son #6 opened it and rolled his eyes. Yet another book his mother was hoping to use to hook him on reading. He grudgingly took it downstairs with his stack of presents. About four hours later, his voice floated up through the stair rail. “Is there another one?” And he’s been reading voraciously ever since. (Thank you, J. K. Rowling)

But of course, no nice story about kids loving reading ever occurs without a ‘catch.’ (My daughter-in-law—Son #5’s wife–uses the acronym KRE: Kids Ruin Everything!) As Daughter #1 tells it, one unlikely evening, all the children born at the time—5 or 6, she isn’t sure–were in her bedroom. They had congregated on her bed, and they were bored—never a healthy combination.

Son #1 proposed a new game (the same son who invented ‘Buck Buck’ in a former post). Likely because of my predilection for all things related to libraries, he called it “Check Out a Book.” Inventing rules as they went along, the kids yelled a name and the words “check out a book”. Whichever child was ‘it’ had to defend him/herself from being thrown off the bed. Violently. Then a new victim was chosen. The winner was the kid left “in the library” without a checked-out book. No matter when they played the game, participants were bruised, sometimes bloody, and at least half the group ended up in tears. It became so popular, they and their friends played it on and off for years. KRE.

So much for the influence of good books!