A05: Oh Lord, Won't You Buy Me A Good Book or Two

Have you ever read a book, story or poem that saved your life?

That's the question that I have been sitting on like a mother duck for about two weeks. It's difficult to answer. What does that even mean, to have something save your life? Can something save your life at one certain time, only to have something else save your life later on? Is it possible to only conquer one danger to your life, one aspect of threat? If that is the case, we could be saved millions of times over.

Maybe I overthink things sometimes.

In that vein, I was laying in bed doing my nightly wet-matter arranging. This, for me, entails a mental list of the things I had needed to get done the present day, picking out what was not completed or not touched at all, a list of what needs to be done the next day, tacking on whichever tasks from the present day seem important enough to roll into a new day, and a general cleaning out of old thoughts and feelings; I turn them over like a found penny and look for usefulness, bits to wipe off, and the year on the front (or the significance, where it fits in with all the other crap lodged in there).


So, I was thinking about being on vacation from work this week and how I will spend the days before school each night when I remembered my outstanding blog suggestions from Prof. Quinlan's page: the one on literary excellence and this one, on which piece of lit has saved my life. I laid there thinking about it and tried to get past what had been giving me such a headache since I read her post, which really comes down to: how many times did something save my life? That question lead me to other places, like why I needed to be saved or how I was saved (as in which part of me/my mind), etc ad infinitum. I guess the difference tonight was realizing it would probably be best to go back to the start, because nothing can not start at the start.


I can't remember too much of being little. There is a lot, yes, but it's all fragments. Here-and-there's of kindergarten and things that people who read this blog really don't need to know. Pictures, snapshots. Enough, I'd say, for me to be who and what I am. I reviewed what I could call to mind and I think I can definitively say I have pinpointed when I first stopped floating, if that makes sense, at least in my own personal world.

My family moved around extremely often, so I was a newcomer at least twice a year. There were also a lot of months between first and fourth grade that I flat out didn't go to school; we were just too much in flux. Anyway, I guess this one teacher (I'm pretty sure it was third grade but it might have been earlier... I really can't remember) saw how much I kept to myself and how little I knew to interact with the kids around me and in contrast to everyone else she didn't force it on me and she didn't ignore me, either. She gave me the gift of finding another way out. Or in, if you prefer. The teacher gave me a Ramona Quimby book.

There was a nice inscription in it that she'd written for me. I read that inscription over and over before I even cracked the first page of the book. I remember looking at the inscription better than I remember which grade I was in. I remember how the teacher looked when she gave it to me. I also remember how I felt as I read it. Unfortunately, I can't remember the inscription (I can see the script on the page in my mind's eye, it's red and very beautifully graceful, but I don't have total recall and can't focus the words exactly). During one of our moves in high school, it was, unfortunately, left behind. The timing, I guess, tells you exactly how much I loved that book, and that teacher. I kept tabs on it until that move, which I wasn't even around for. (I was at summer camp and wasn't involved in the weeding and sorting of possessions.)

When I started to read that book, something just sort of slid into place in my mind. Beverly Cleary, I can say now, is a pretty good author for a little kid; the images and the characters were fleshed out vividly enough. A lot of showing, a lot of clear descriptions. I'm not saying I found anything incredible in Ramona Quimby, it's just that I didn't have to think about the things that were going on around me in the same way that I could think about Ramona and her father, Ramona and her school. I could spend so much time thinking about those things, that nothing else could have room - at least, nothing that was unwanted. That teacher, for better and definitely not for worse in my opinion, gave one scrappy little kid the most precious thing for kids like that: a place to hide.

I guess it's from that simple act of kindness that everything else grew. I started looking for better imagery, longer sentences, bigger words, more characters; I started reading more and more, trying to challenge myself to find an even better corner of the world. Because of that teacher and her infinitely wonderful gesture, I was given a chance to improve myself... Probably the only real chance I had. I really do believe that. If it weren't for her, I might not have wanted to read, I might not even have realized exactly how precious knowledge can be or where you can go if you have it.

That teacher, I am telling you, was one smart cookie.

I don't hide in books anymore - not like that, anyway. I still find it quite easy to "lose myself" in a book, to be so deeply engrossed that I forget that my lunch hour is close to being up, that I have a class in a few hours, or that laundry needs to be done... But I think that the savior quality of books has run its course for me. Have there been other versions of some piece saving my life? Surely. But nothing, I think, so significant. Things like that, I think, matter more when you're young. Besides, it's no good to hide from the world when you're older... You get too big for under-the-bed habits. Something else taught me that, but that's another story entirely.