A brief glance backwards

I’ve lived my life buoyed by books.

When I was growing up, my most beloved gifts were books. Birthdays and Christmas, that’s what I asked for, that’s what I most anticipated — along with the bike that appeared one year, naturally. That was pretty special too.

And I read. I read a lot. At the beginning of every school year, I read clean through the texts that I liked, the ones that told stories, the ones that focused on aspects of language or history or culture. The aunt who taught reading showered me with miscellaneous language texts and workbooks, and I read and worked through them for fun. My grandmother sent me classic children’s fiction. I gathered all my books into a little book cabinet I’d also been given. Sometimes, I’d just sit there in front of it, sliding the wooden doors from right to left, looking at my collection with satisfaction.

But the greatest delight was the library, which housed more books than I could ever hope to read.

Weekends were for trips to the closest library, for entering the worlds of magic and mystery, of places long ago and far away, of life as it could be and was. (And, yes, I sometimes read in a tree.) These were the golden days of Edward Eager, Joan Aiken, Mary Norton, Eleanor Cameron, Edward Osmond, Edward Ormondroyd, Elizabeth Enright, William Mayne, Meindert DeJong, Barbara Cooney, Philippa Pearce, C.S. Lewis, Penelope Farmer, Eleanor Estes, Scott O’Dell, Marguerite Henry, and many, many others, authors whose vision and whose words helped to shape my childhood.

That is what I remember most of early and middle childhood. In high school, life became far more complex — and I wasn’t always reading. But I did still read a lot, as did most of my friends. The tales of wonder that I’d particularly loved as a child now yielded to science fiction, historical fiction, all of those literary classics that we read as teens, and other gems that I stumbled across. Reading was still completely immersive. The world around me fell away as I dipped into a book.

Small wonder that when I headed off to college, there was only one department I considered the natural center of that universe, no matter how many constellations it embraced, and that was the one that made reading and writing its particular study. The one that taught you how to do things with words.

And that’s where I’ve been ever since, in one way or another. Teaching and tutoring. Editing. Writing.

It’s all about the words. It’s always been about the words.