Paperback Magic
Fall 2023
I'm a little bit of a book hoarder who cannot possibly resist the lure of a used book sale or the feel of a paperback book in my hands. I currently have five bookcases at home, all with three shelves with two rows of books on each, bowing under the strain of my obsession. My children tease me and say they think they can hear the shelves whimpering whenever I try to cram another book into spaces that don’t exist. Then there are the storage containers hiding in the basement that are filled with even more.
Is it escapism? Somewhat. I mean, who wouldn’t rather cuddle up with an 18th-century Scottish lad or lass, infiltrate some creepy mountains to destroy a ring, or color with all the shades of gray instead of attending another Zoom meeting? Is it bibliotherapy? Absolutely! I’m hooked on the idea that every single book on every single shelf in the world is the passion child of the person who wrote it. I love holding and caring for something someone else breathed life into. And I don’t mean just novels. I have books on hawks, knot tying, cold-weather camping, cameras, minerals, astronomy, fishing lures, foreign languages, you name it. I’m drawn to the commitment necessary to immortalize the mundane and make it exciting. But, for me, it’s more.
My first memory of a store is being surrounded by towering (to me) shelves of books in Womrath’s Bookstore in the 1970s. I have a vague idea that I was wearing a dress and holding my mother’s hand, but I vividly remember looking up, up, up at all the books and feeling like I was stepping into a second home, warm and more important—familiar. I had been there before, probably many times before, because bookstores and libraries were my mother’s favorite places to spend a day, the evidence of which could be seen on every book-covered flat surface in my family’s home. Books were my first friends and my connection to my mother and the world.
Alas, I was not a strong reader. Despite having gone to story times and making so many trips to libraries that the librarians knew and stocked my favorite snacks, I still could not read by the beginning of second grade. I spent that year visiting “the trailer,” my school’s nickname for the reading intervention room, every day for thirty minutes. Day after day, I worked in my phonics workbook, and night after night, my mom continued to read stories to me and made me practice writing the words I had learned during the day. By the beginning of the summer between second and third grade, my mother was intent on turning the literary tides. No daughter of hers was going to be deprived of the joy of reading! She whisked me off to the library on the first day of summer vacation. We checked out the book Freckle Juice by Judy Blume and got to work. Together, we read well over twenty novels that summer. The last one was the novelization of The Karate Kid, which I read by myself.
It surprised no one when I became a high school English teacher. I mean, my mom and I used to marvel that I actually got paid to talk about Shakespeare, Steinbeck, and Shelley when I, honestly, would have done it for free. My mother, who was not a high school graduate, loved listening to my theories and interpretations of books we had previously shared and could reexamine together. Together, we shared a love affair with all things biblio. To us, the feel and smell are as intoxicating as the words that come alive between each set of covers.
Unfortunately, my mother was recently diagnosed with moderate dementia. She had hidden it very well. I only noticed when I cleared out a few stacks of old books from her room and saw that she had been writing in them, something akin to vandalizing a church in my mother’s former mindset of just a few months ago. She’s becoming combative, even aggressive, because she doesn’t remember the simplest things or because her most recent memories just won’t stick. But, oh, ask her to identify the real monster in Frankenstein or tell you who’s to blame in Romeo and Juliet? No problem. She remembers the books she read years ago better than she remembers most people other than me. So, for as long as I have left with the woman who gave me life and then changed it, I’ll still use books as my way to her.