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In a Hole in the Ground…
September 21, 2014 3 Comments

In a Hole in the Ground…

In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort.

I will not praise The Hobbit as a perfect work. Even as a kid, each year I read it in 3rd, 4th, and 5th grade, I saw the book’s faults. I always thought Thorin or Bilbo should have taken out Smaug — not some human who just appears and saves the day. I won’t go on about the decline of the book from that point on…it was something I saw even as a child.

But that opening and the world it created in my mind…

No other book — not even Ray Bradbury’s Dandelion Wine — put a world into my head like The Hobbit.

That opening, and the mention of comfort…

The Meaning of Comfort

There is a lot to be said about comfort, just as there is a lot to be said about stepping out far and wide and seeing the world beyond our Shires. There is even more, perhaps, to be said about returning home a very changed person.

As a child, The Hobbit was a book about adventure — a book that showed me how I could escape and see places of legend made real inside my head. As an adult, I see that one could argue that it’s a book about life.

I am happy that my life is comfortable…that I have business to attend to and friends to see. That I have words to write, and someone with whom I can share all these things (and more).

But in other ways, I am even happier to know that should I ever become complacent in my comfort, that there is so much out beyond my own Shire…and that I now have the confidence to face more than I ever imagined, all because of a little book released today in 1937
.

Cover to The Hobbit

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The Places Where I’ve Read
September 12, 2013 1 Comment

The Places Where I’ve Read

Sometimes when I write, I feel a connection to the front room on 1422 Dunleer. In those moments, I’m 12 years old again, trapped in that horrid couch made sometime in the 70s. I say trapped because the couch was tilted back and set low to the ground; so low that when my mother and step father had friends over and wine was had, any adults sitting on that couch either required help freeing themselves from its grasp or had to wait for sobriety to return so they could roll off the couch and onto the floor, where they had better odds of standing
.

That front room on Dunleer was a magical place…it’s where I read Stephen King’s Different Seasons and John Irving’s The World According to Garp. Before that, in our den with the shag carpet and sunken area around a free-standing fireplace, I came to know the short stories of John Cheever while watching the fire reflected in the glass sliding door on the other side of the room, the only thing between me and snow and 50 degrees below zero with wind chill.

But there was a house before Dunleer…

Grove Street

134 E. Grove, where I learned to read. My older sister’s bedroom was littered with books; it was like someone tipped over a small library on her floor. Part of the fun, there, was in the discovery…finding The Gold Bug and Other Tales, a collection of Edgar Allan Poe stories, buried at the bottom of it all. “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” fascinated me while also terrifying me. At night before falling to sleep, I was convinced any sound that didn’t belong was an orangutan with a straight razor coming for me in the dark.

On stormy nights, it was going to my mother’s room, climbing between cool sheets, and having her read from Carl Sandburg’s Rootabaga Stories. To this day, I do not tire from reading “The Dollar Watch and the Five Jackrabbits.”

There were winter afternoons in the living room, flooded with light from a huge picture window to the backyard. I could lie there all day with the warmth of shag carpet on my stomach after staying in place long enough to become its symbiont. Why not read Ray Bradbury’s Dandelion Wine again in the middle of a Chicagoland winter?

Other Houses

  • 527 S. Chestnut, where I consumed Jack London’s works in 6th grade. It was my Kansas year — a year of living with my father. To this day, that book is one of my all-time favorite Christmas gifts.
  • 2735 Raintree Drive, where the bands Rush and Iron Maiden led me to discover the Romantic poets, which gave way to the discovery of the Transcendentalists.
  • The apartment on Grayson Drive, where I fell in love with my childhood all over again after rereading Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time.
  • 521 E. Worth, where I started writing with purpose and discovered my favorite book, Robert Olmstead’s A Trail of Heart’s Blood Wherever We Go.
  • Denton I — The house on the access road of Interstate 35, where I got back into comic books.
  • Denton II — The apartment in the middle of Cement City, where I think all I read were comic books!
  • 1670 Choteau Circle, where reading helped me get through being a primary caretaker for my sister as she stopped reading for good.
  • The apartment where I’m writing this blog entry, where I discovered Jim Lynch’s The Highest Tide, Border Songs, and Truth Like the Sun.

Future Houses

I don’t know where the future will find me, but I do know one thing if the past is any indication of the present: I will always continue reading books that I will carry with me until the day comes that I can read no more…

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The Power of Books
July 20, 2013 2 Comments

The Power of Books

Growing up, I never realized after my parents divorced that we weren’t well off. I wouldn’t say we were poor, although looking back — I’m amazed that my mom was able to support my sister and me. It never dawned on me that money was tight.

I knew there were houses larger than ours. I had friends who lived in some of those houses, and while they were neat, few had as many books as we had in our house. We had shelves in the downstairs living room
. My sister’s room was littered with books. My mom’s room wasn’t messy like my sister’s room, but it was full of books. I had bookcases filled with books in my room. Books in the upstairs living room…even old books out on the enclosed front porch. When my mom eventually remarried, my step father came with more books.

Our house was full of information and stories. Sure, my sister and I loved television, music, and everything else kids liked, but I could dig through books about how the world worked or read stories both made up and true. I had plenty of old toys, but it was books that made me feel like no matter how tight things were, we had everything we needed. Some of the cases towered over me; they were commanding walls full of more than I could initially imagine. And because of those walls of books, I eventually imagined so much more.

My imagination saved me growing up. No matter how picked on I was, I had three places where I could run and hide: outside, in my mind, or in a book. My copy of Andrew Henry’s Meadow still has dirt from the backyard of the house where I grew up. The second time I read The Hobbit, it was in the top of the big pine tree out back. Any fear of storms was shoved aside as my mom read me Carl Sandburg’s Rootabaga Stories.

I can look back on those times and now realize we had one of the lower household incomes on the block. My mom worried about money, but I never sensed that concern. To me, we were richer than every house on the block I’d been in, with the exception of our neighbors — who very well may have had more books than us. But for a family that consisted of my mother, my sister, and me, we gave the Fishers a run for the money when it came to packed bookcases and books spilling out onto bedroom floors. In my bedroom at night, I was like Smaug, the dragon from The Hobbit, but instead of sitting atop a pile of gold, I commanded a far greater treasure: piles and piles of books…thousands and thousands of pages covered with words, each one a gold coin that ensured I would never want for anything more.

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