Bookworm

When I was six years old, I entered 1st grade at St. Jude the Apostle school on the outskirts of Chicago. It was where me and my five siblings would spend eight years under the guidance of the nuns of the Congregation of Notre Dame. My first teacher was Mother St. Thomas, a gentle and kind woman who years later would leave the convent, marry, and have a family of her own. The classes in our school were big, often close to fifty kids, and I wanted nothing more each day than to leave and be home with my mom. That wasn’t an option and I was always placed in the front of the class where it wasn’t cool to be seen sucking my thumb.

I never liked 1st grade but over time I relied on Mother St. Thomas as my daytime alternate mom. She was often sick, though, and there was a steady stream of substitute teachers. As a result I didn’t know the basics of anything, especially reading. As the school year was winding down, it was suggested to my mom that I be held back to repeat first grade. This was common then, there’d always be several kids in a class held back and that were forever labeled “dumb.” Because I had a sister a year younger than me, my mom said, “Over my dead body are you going to be holding Kathy back. She will go on to second grade,” and so I did.

I don’t remember much of the next few years. In 2nd grade I had Mother St. Williams who was a tyrant and daily wacked kids with her ruler. Hearing the thwack of the wood hitting a hand and then muffled crying didn’t make for ideal learning conditions. In spite of that, most years I’d be awarded a certificate for perfect attendance, an honor for daily showing up at the place that scared the daylights out of me.

During the summer before 4th grade, my mom took me to the local library and enrolled me in the summer reading program. It came with my very own library card and a chart. Every time you read a book and returned it to the library you got a star. I think behind the scenes my mom talked to the librarian in the children’s section about me needing some help. That’s when I was introduced to Little House on the Prairie, and the reading switch suddenly lit up like a Christmas tree. I couldn’t get enough of Laura Ingalls and her adventures on the prairie and read every one of the books in the series. Back then you were either a Little House kid or a Nancy Drew kid. I was not only a card carrying member of the prairie camp, I wanted to be Laura Ingalls.

With so many kids and one car that my dad had five days a week, I now realize what a monumental feat this was for my mom. The three boys had their constant little league games and I had the library, and somehow Mom managed to pull off getting everyone where they needed to be. Sometimes her and I would go to the library after dinner, sometimes on Saturday. Mom would put on her pink Avon lipstick, a square of her blotted lips smiling from the toilet bowl, and we’d get in the car and come home with a pile of books for me to read. When summer was over and my chart was filled with 100 stars, Mom announced at the dinner table what I’d accomplished. I like to think that we were in cahoots with all those trips back and forth to the library, but it was Mom doing everything she could to push her kid over the reading mountain.

Every summer I think about those years I muddled my way through a sea of words that were such a mystery until the Ingalls family came along. Since Mark died, reading has been a challenge for me. In the first year my retention was so bad that I could read an entire book and not be able to tell you anything about it. I’ve burned through dozens of books on grief, some have been helpful, some a waste of time. I tend to read non-fiction as many people have lives far more interesting than could be imagined, but one summer I read Poisonwood Bible, a book about an overzealous preacher who moves his family to Africa to spread the word of God. Turns out they are ill-equipped to live in this environment and when the fire ants make their deadly march through the village I swear you can feel your skin crawling with every turn of the page. In a cottage in Washington I laughed so hard reading A Walk In The Woods that Mark wanted me to hurry up and finish it so he could read it. When we were pulled over on the side of the road in Idaho because an RV was on fire, I read the last pages of Tuesdays With Morrie. “How was it?”, Mark asked and I couldn’t talk. On the couch in Maryland bundled up in a blanket in July, I read Into Thin Air. A Tender Bar lives up to its title, a tender tale of a boy growing up to be a man under the guidance of the regulars at a bar in Boston. I cried on our back porch reading When Breath Becomes Air. I have read Bird By Bird more times than I could count. A few months before Mark died I read Educated, and every night told him he wouldn’t believe this woman’s story. I have deliberately slowed my reading on many a book because I didn’t want the story to end.

This summer I decided it’s time to ditch all the grief and self-help books to immerse myself in stories that take me far away from my regular life. Nine year old me will give herself a star for every book read, and profusely thank the universe for a very harried, young mom who fiercely believed that within the pages of a book her daughter could go on one adventure after another.