Reading, Part I

Today and tomorrow I am in Frankfort, Kentucky, teaching state environmental regulators about the OSHA requirements for folks in their jobs.  It is, as they say, “a dirty job but someone has to do it.” 

Such trips give me the freedom to do what I can seldom manage at home: to sit in a (hotel) room and write. For some time I have had the urge to write a few words about each book as I finish it, but since I get most of my books from the public library, that means STACKS of books sitting around and being rechecked online until I get round to writing them up.  Last night I wrote up an even dozen books that had been heaped up over the past couple of months. [Author’s disclosure: I don’t always “read” in the usual sense, as my wife constantly reminds me.  Eight of the items were CD audiobooks.  But without audiobooks to accompany my commutes, I would get little read.]

I have had a love of reading since the first grade in Jefferson Elementary School where Miss (Mrs?) Manney taught me the fascinating tales of the Tick-Tock Dwarf (the letter T as it’s called on Sesame Street) and his 25 companions.  But my love of books predates that time: I was read to at bedtime almost my whole preschool childhood.   When I was in high school I wrote an essay about my reading history for English class, and I told how my mother would read to me and my brothers each night.  However, when I showed the essay to Mom, she said it wasn’t true: Dad did the reading. 

Even at this advanced age my mind boggles: Dad worked 10-12 hours a day at the bakery six days a week, and he still had the time, energy, and desire to read to three squirming boys night after night? 

We never fully understand what motivates our parents.  A standing puzzle is that Mom had the college degree (U T Austin) and Dad had a single semester at O U Norman at the height of the depression only to realize that his job at his father’s wholesale bakery would provide a more secure future than that apparently in store for the MAs in Norman with who were driving taxis.  But while mom’s only serious intellectual activities were playing contract bridge and solving the hard puzzles in the crossword collections she bought at the supermarket, Dad was an almost unstoppable reader in the limited free time he had at home.  He always had three or four newspaper/magazine subscriptions and he regularly read Reader’s Digest Condensed Books.

Most people thought of him as a baker, and he was a truly excellent one, but it was his livelihood, not his life.  When I asked him, probably while I was elbow deep in the scrub sink at the bake shop and looking for a more pleasurable task, whether he was going to teach me to bake, he replied unhesitatingly “Not unless there is no other job you would like to have.”  He took the life he was handed and crafted into a life he could find satisfaction in.   And by doing so I think he taught me to do the same.   And he helped me become a reader to provide a pathway.