Reading Memories
My Dad possessed a strength of character and a unique insight that few people display. He had this extraordinary ability to know instinctively exactly what secret hidden desires I held held deep inside, but we never spoke of it.
It was my Dad who introduced me to one of the most magical places a child can ever discover: the library.
My Dad was a reader who loved all manner of books in his early years and later no matter the subject, he never passed up a newspaper, pamphlet or magazine to read. He devoured words like nobody’s business. My brilliant Dad was such an incredible reader that even as his mind was clouded with the confusion of dementia, he hungered for reading. When he could no longer string a coherent thought together, he would read street signs out loud while riding in the car or read the same newspaper article over and over again until someone took it away from him.
Because of my Dad, I am a reader.
My Dad took me to our local branch of the St. Louis County Library to get my first library card when I was barely 6 and then we would go — just him and me — nearly every Saturday morning of my early childhood.
When we arrived we separated.
He went to his area and I relished my first taste of independence in the children’s section where I was allowed to choose whatever books struck my fancy. He would read newspapers and pick out books. I would pick out books; he would read to me.
I remember a lot about those Saturday mornings. I remember sitting on a pea green leather circular sofa (it was circa 1970 and I’m betting pea green was the Pantone color that year) and I remember Flat Stanley.
It was a skinny paperback book, the cover featured that famous flat friend sporting green pants and block letters spelling out his name and my Dad read it to me while I fell in love: with the spirit of my marvelous father, with the storytelling of Stanley Lambchop who was flattened by a bulletin board while sleeping and, ultimately, with reading.
Those three images: my dad, that book and how that book turned me into a lifelong reader have always been intertwined in my vault of memories. But as I was growing up, I never communicated to my dad what those trips to the library meant, what he had given me.
When I mentioned this visceral memory to my mom and my sisters, they all sort of shrugged. They weren’t there. They didn’t get it and I wouldn’t even bring it up to my brother, whose own memories of our dad have absolutely nothing to do with books or the library.
I’ve been thinking a lot about this.
Wow, I thought, how lucky am I to hold these reading memories with my Dad, so dear. By the early 1990s, I was a mother myself; I thought a lot about how parents make memories for their children. I thought about how my reading and my husband’s reading to our children was a sacred ritual and how reading to myself connected me to my Dad, and I thought about Flat Stanley and how he took advantage of his special features of being flat, just exactly like my Dad taught me to take advantage of my special gift of the love of reading.
