Every day we sit in the car, under the carport after having already spent two hours driving, back and forth to school.
We listen for just another few minutes. A few minutes turns into ten and then 20.
The house calls us. After-school snacks and drinks of water and time snuggling on the couch and perhaps a show or two look about in bewilderment that we’re not there yet, but we can’t get enough.
And so we stay in the car.
My nearly 8-year-old and I have a 2-hour round-trip drive to school, and so we pass the time with audiobooks.
We’ve listened to every single Magic Treehouse story several times over, anticipating the troubles before they even occur. And saying “Oh Annie!” at just the right time.
This time we chose A Wrinkle in Time, a book I somehow never managed to read even though I’ve always devoured books.
My love of books began quite young…while I don’t recall my parents reading to me much, I vividly remember carefully setting the little records that came with a set of Little Golden books that my Grandma gave me on my suitcase-style turntable and following along, delightfully turning the page of my very own The Lively Little Rabbit at the ding. My very own set…or maybe I stole them, as my brother claims. In my memory, they were always mine, but it seems they were his first. Hmmm.
That wee suitcase turntable, another prized possession that I’m quite certain was mine, played my goofy gold record many a time as I roller skated in tight little circles in the half-Michigan basement to One-Eyed Purple People Eater.
Goodness are basements creepy!
One room of the basement was all poured cement, but in the next room, the one that I didn’t enter and which I skated extra fast past the open doorway, was mostly dirt and dark and dank and dreary.
Once I braved the unknown and found old, gray mason jars of food stacked on dusty, dirt-covered wooden shelves. As a canner and preserving now, I would have been delighted at the proof of life and care…but young me imagined all sorts of witchy things.
Speaking of witchy things, A Wrinkle In Time is simply gripping us in its mind-expanding hold.
What a feast that book is. It’s been an experience to both listen for the first time myself, at 45, and imagine what my wee boy thinks and understands.
In the forward by the author, Madeleine L-Engle, she shares how the magic of the book is ageless but it’s extra special for 8-12-year-olds.
And from the back, my 7-year-old for only 2 more weeks shouts…I’m going to be 8! So excited that it was made for him.
And I smile to myself and think he IS still a little boy. Even though he often seems so much older and wiser and more argumentative than his years!
Books. I once heard a quote about books that went something like…books have the power to teach us more about life than living does. Or something to that effect and I believe it to be so. In a book, you can explore an idea, develop your values, and feel into a situation that would be traumatic or so scary in real life, you have a chance to see something from another’s perspective…both the author’s and the character that they are working to allow come through. And you’re safe.
However, does this happen to you too? I find that, for a bit of time, I take on the emotions of the book I am reading and so when interrupted to make dinner in the middle of a rousing castle siege, I’m growling and brandishing the knife with extra sass. And at the angsty, sadness-ridden part I am unexplainably melancholy and downtrodden. Or jumpy, or elated, or furious. It’s a curious thing.
It’s part of why stories that leave the door to evil or anguish slightly open are hard for me and I find that in my Pollyanna way, I simply imagine the next part of the story as being hopeful and bright.
Now this is not to say that I shy away from hard things or deep dark emotions. I am unafraid to walk through the fire…it’s just that I am eternally optimistic and I believe that “this too shall pass” and that we as humans have the capacity to find joy and peace in any circumstances.
Not long ago, I read the book “The BookWoman of Troublesome Creek” by Kim Michele Richardson. It was fascinating both in its depiction of the trials and tribulations of the Kentucky Blue People, anyone who’s not the same as the larger group really, and the amazing stories of human resiliency and the way books can offer freedom through the Pack Horse Librarian program of the 1930s.
The story shows the deep craving folks have for a story to take them out of their everyday lives, to give them joy and hope. To witness life.
I was talking with my old boss a few weeks ago and he was sharing how in his experience the newest generations of workers have a different relationship with work and have such different social skills. That he’s not sure where we are headed as a people.
I shared that I feared we have lost some of our resiliency, our ability to persevere and prosper by our own grit alone.
Now, I’m willing to consider that I am simply a 45-year-old woman and he is simply a 70-year-old man and we are doing what aging generations have done since the dawn of time…watching new generations behaving differently than us and worrying.
But, I also know that we as humans have a tendency to overcompensate, or overshoot really when changing and it takes a bit of getting out of balance to settle back into balance.
And so I wonder… with the knowledge that I can’t possibly know the beauty that might unfold, and also with some fear about where our virtual lives will take us.