The Book

The sun streamed in through the long wide windows on the south facing wall of the library. Some of the kids hated library time because they thought reading was dumb and we had to be quiet. I loved the quiet of the library. I wished I could sit in there all day instead of going to the classroom. The peace of the room and the chance to disappear into another world drew me like a magnet. It was probably the best room in the entire school. If someone had offered for me to live my whole life in that library I would have happily taken them up on the offer and never returned home.

 We had only recently begun getting to select our own books to check out. There were rows and rows filled with books of different colors, shapes and sizes. I was mesmerized. In the front sections where many of my classmates made their selections, the books were flat and wide and had lots of pictures on the pages. Sometimes those books had great stories, but they went by so fast. Some of my classmates had gone a level up from that and were getting books that had a few pictures and more words. I didn’t want books from any of those sections. I tested the boundaries of our newfound liberty and wandered three more aisles in. I nervously looked around, spotting Ms. Pridemore, the Librarian. She caught my eye and nodded, giving me permission to go a little farther if I wanted.

I was hoping to get to check out a book that would last long enough to take more than a couple of minutes to read. The problem was choosing the book. I just had no idea what I was interested in. From the looks of the rows and rows, how could anyone know what they were interested in? Was there even enough time in the world to even read everything in the room? I’d heard people say not to judge a book by its cover, but I thought that was kind of dumb. If you hadn’t read it yet, you had nothing to go on but the cover. I judged the covers with a harsh eye.

Time was running out. I was going to have to make a choice. A title caught my eye, “Where the Red Fern Grows”. The cover had a boy holding a lantern with two dogs. I flipped it over and read the back. I wasn’t sure if it was what I was looking for. I opened it up and looked at the pages. The print on the pages was small, the smallest I’d ever read. I heard Ms. Pridemore calling the class, so I just took it with me and got in line to check it out.

“You’re getting that?” a classmate asked me. “Yes” I replied. “Does it even have any pictures?” he said. “No” I replied. “Ew” he said. I shrugged my shoulders. I wasn’t deterred by his comments. In fact, I felt emboldened. There was something in me that liked to go against the grain.

I started reading the book in between subjects. In second grade we didn’t have a ton of down time but there could be 10 or 15 minutes of lull while other people were finishing up assignments. I tended to finish my work quickly for better or for worse. I learned to love periods in class where they told us to take out a book and read. The class might echo a collective groan of frustration, but I danced with glee inside.

Quickly I was wrapped up in the story of Billy. Our lives weren’t the same but nevertheless, I related to him. Wilson Rawls may have intended to write the words on the page, but he also wrote them on my heart. I yearned when Billy yearned, I was sad when he was sad. Somehow, someone else out there in the world had felt something and managed to reach out across space and time through the pages of this book and make me feel it too.

I started to feel inconvenienced by daily life. The things that had to be done that kept me from reading the book were annoying. Regular classwork, eating, chores, interacting with other people. I just wanted to get back to the book. As I got further and further into the story, I also started to feel worry that the book was coming to an end. What was going to happen? I didn’t want the story to be over. I wanted to continuously read and live the rest of the story as it happened.

I would finish my dinner in a hurry to sit down with the book before I had to go to bed. In the morning I would wake up and hurry through breakfast and getting dressed to sit there and read my book while we waited for the bus. I lived hour by hour looking for the next opportunity to open the pages and dive in. So caught up in the story, I was basically living to read.

Much to my own surprise, one week later I finished the book. It happened on the bus on the way home. I discovered two things that day. The first one was that it was very difficult for me to read in a moving vehicle. I felt sick and disoriented. I was at a place in the book that I could not stop reading. I needed to keep going. The second thing I discovered was that a book could make me cry. I turned my head away and discreetly wiped my tears. Getting off the bus, I shoved the book in my backpack and walked out ahead like I was in a hurry. “Where are you going?” Ronda hollered. Trying my best to make my voice sound normal I hollered back “I have to go to the bathroom!”  As I walked in the door I restated my story, “I have to go to the bathroom” and I stuck to it by heading down the hall to go in. I closed the door behind me, something we hardly ever did. I cried in the bathroom for Billy.

I felt somewhat betrayed by the book, because it hadn’t turned out the way I had wanted it to. I understood the point of it, though, and it forced me to appreciate it. I guess that’s what I learned from the experience of reading that first novel. Sometimes the benefit isn’t that the story wraps up neatly, its that we are forced to look at something with someone else’s eyes.

The day in the library I had no idea the emotional impact that was about to rain down upon my life with the paperback I carried in my hand. I checked that book out as one person and returned it to the library a different person altogether. That was my first metamorphosis in reading a book. The truth was that it would happen every time I read a book. Not every book left the emotional impact of Where the Red Fern Grows, but each book did leave a piece of its author behind. That was where the magic happened.

I earned much scorn at home for having my “nose stuck in a book” or being “dead to the world” because I was lost in another story. While I may have been the only one reading those words at that time, I was looking at a piece of the author as though he was standing right there with me, sharing a piece of himself directly. I was united with every other person who had read that same story and felt that same connection.

It turned out that reading was only solitary in the physical sense. In all of the other senses, it was as close to a community as I’d ever experienced. It was my community.