Number Fourteen

The morning started out relatively cool, and we had nowhere to go, so I decided it was as good a time as any to get in the attic and go through the boxes I've been toting around for 20 or so years. It would be a good day to mark something off the list of Thirty-Nine.

There were a half dozen, stacked in a corner, the tape that held them together yellowed and peeling. "Kelly - kid stuff" hastily scrawled in black marker across the top. I'm sure that when I packed them, I assumed they would get to their destination and be neatly sorted and put away. I certainly didn't think they'd journey through three states, 4 apartments and 3 houses. I certainly didn't think most of the things wouldn't see the light of day until two decades later.

It was going to be a little like Christmas.

The first few boxes were easy - books and books and books. Crazy weird books, well-worn books, my beloved Nancy Drews. I sorted them quickly into piles for the children, piles for a yard sale, piles to keep in a box. This is a piece of cake, I thought.

Then I faced down the biggest box, 2 feet square and up to my waist, full of dolls. There were two things I loved more than anything as a child, books and dolls. I knew the dolls would be in questionable condition. My 20 year old self had taken no care or regard in packing, and the box was a jumbled mess. Mandy, Victoria, Holly Hobby, shoved on top of the Madame Alexander dolls that were my pride and joy at 8. The dolls from Malta, Indonesia...all the places my father had traveled, each one a gift to me when he returned home. A small, silken pillow my grandmother had made, sprayed with her perfume and given me shortly before her death. I had slept with it many nights, and it was the closest I could come to not missing her. Now it was all a mess, with broken arms and wrinkled clothes, the perfume on the pillow an ugly brown. An ink pen, carelessly thrown in the box during packing, had leaked and big blue blotches stained some of the dolls.


It was a sad, ruined box.

I laid out the dolls, looking to see which ones were salvageable, and which ones were better tossed out. At the end of the sorting, the pile of what was worthwhile was pitiably small. I looked at the broken dolls and realized it would be impossible to throw any of them out.

And so I packed them back in the box, exercising more care with them broken than I ever did with them whole. This box would just have to move with us, wherever we may go, for the rest of my life. I will leave it up to my children to sort through it when I'm gone, because I just don't have the heart to.

Five Books That Rocked My World. When I Was Ten.

I was digging through a box of books in the attic, looking for something that Katie might like to read. There, under the Nancy Drews and Oz books, was tucked a very well worn, very much loved, copy of Judy Blume's classic, Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret. I gasped and ran down to the stairs and shoved it in Katie's hands.

You MUST read this.
Oh, okay.
No, really. Start now. Just read the first page.
I'll read it when I get back from camp, I have one to read now. 
OK, but just read the first page. READ IT!

She looked at me like I had two heads, but obliged, then sat it on the counter to wait a week for her to return. I am so anxious for her to read it, because I remember so clearly being 10, and on the edge of puberty, and reading that book and feeling like Judy Blume could see into my very soul. Because for the first time, I was reading a book about a girl my age that wasn't a little kid book. It was a frank and honest and open look at exactly what my friends and I were going through every day. It made me realize that books could not only be an escape, they could be this totally relevant, totally topical way of dealing with my own, very real, life.

Stumbling across Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret made me think of all the books I read in my preteen years that had such a tremendous impact. So here's a list of my Formative Five - the 5 novels (including the Judy Blume) that blew my 10-12 year old mind.

5. Pet Semetary: OK. No 10 year old has any business reading Stephen King's horrifying novel of an Indian burial ground that brings pets - and people - back to life. Not only is King the master of scary, he is a really, really excellent writer. The last line of the book - "Darrrrrling." gave me nightmares for weeks, and sticks with me more than 25 years later. Anyone that can have that effect with a single word is a pretty amazing.

4. Princess Daisy (Judith Krantz): One of the downsides to keeping all your books on a communal shelf is that your 10 year old has access to the kind of soft porn that made Krantz so popular with suburban housewives in the early '80s. It is a filthy book and, coupled with Sidney Sheldon's A Stranger in the Mirror, it taught me more about sex than 5th grade health class, "the talk" with my parents and Porky's, combined.

3. The Choirboys (Joseph Wambaugh): Another one off of my parents' bookshelves. Is it any wonder I am so cracked? Wambaugh's fictional look at the off duty lives of the boys in blue showed me that everyone is human, everyone is stupid, and sometimes, even the good guys are bad boys.

2. Bridge to Terabithia (Katherine Paterson): Occasionally, I even read age appropriate books! While I was not an unpopular kid, I always had a sense of being different. This book celebrated those differences, and put such a tremendous value in creativity, and friendship, and loyalty. It is a beautiful story, and probably the first one that elicited a powerful emotional response from me.

1. Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret: On behalf of two generations of prepubescent girls, and our boobs - thank you, Judy Blume.

Bookworm

I was a bookish child. I read in the car, at the dinner table, under the covers with a flashlight. I woke up early to read before school. I wore my eyes out trying to finish a chapter before fading out in the wee hours. My parents encouraged me to read, and did one of the best things I think you can do for a kid - restricted nothing. I read books I had no business reading (and really, books no one has any business reading. Flowers in the Attic, anyone?), books that terrified and enlightened, books that had to be read alongside the dictionary. Books that opened my eyes to worlds I didn't know existed.

I've learned more about religion, culture, history and psychology from popular fiction than I ever learned in school. I've met a more horrible villain (in Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian) and a crueler villainess (in W. Somerset Maugham's Of Human Bondage) than ever conceived by the scriptwriters of Law & Order. Our politicians could take a page from Thackeray's Becky Sharp on how to do in flagrante delicto with style. Hell, I wouldn't even know what in flagrante delicto was unless I was a reader! It is nothing more than being fairly well read that makes people think I'm smarter than I actually am.

I've read books about things I never even knew existed (like black slave owners in Edward P. Jones' The Known World), and things I'm terribly ignorant about (pretty much everything that was not covered in US and World History during high school. Which is a lot.). I love to read about places that might be (Narnia, Wonderland, the Shire) and places I'll never see. It is an amazing thing to know that knowing something, being somewhere, being someone else - is as simple as sitting down and opening a book.

I started this entry with a list - five books everyone should read. It turned into ten books everyone should read, five books no one should read, five books that changed the way I think about things, one book I'm reading now, five books I have on deck to read, and so on. Instead, I'll close it with a shot of Julia 'reading' the book I'm reading now. This one I would recommend restricting to your young readers. Unless you want them cursing you in two languages.

Go. Read something.