Back when I was a young’un, my mother always said she knew where to look if we were in the drug store or the five-and-dime and she couldn’t find me: The Books.
There I’d be, planted on the floor in the Cards/Stationary/Books/Whatever-else aisle, taking the books out of the racks, leafing through them page by page, mesmerized by the pictures long before I could read a single word. Often I’d beg her to buy me one; and sometimes she would, when she had the money. (An indulgent mother, she never required much begging – when she had the money.) I can still picture the pages of my Little Golden Book edition of Peter Rabbit, such an innocent, exploring bunny (Me), and that frightening Mr. McGregor (the threatening world all around) who wanted Peter (Me) GONE!
If only I still had it. I could open it for comfort at those times of 2 AM terror, which sometimes still happen, 70 plus years on.
The selection was limited, of course; these were not bookstores. I don’t remember going to a bookstore with my parents (or at all) until I was well along in years, though there must have been some, even in my youngest days, even in Lubbock, since there was a college there.
I do remember, vividly, a first visit to Varsity Bookstore, across the street from that college, probably sometime around 1960. I felt so out of place, like an undocumented alien, that I couldn’t muster the nerve to settle onto the floor, as of old, to thumb the books. There were so MANY! And “they,” the keepers of the volumes, seemed to be watching me like multiple Mr. McGregors, knowing I didn’t belong.
We were not a bookish family. I don’t recall a single book in the house before I began to bring them in, though there must have been a bible, not of the Family Bible sort, but enough for occasional Sunday churching (not too often). Neither of my parents read much, and not books, mostly newspapers when they did read, or sometimes “women’s magazines” for my mother. Certainly not novels; no time for such as those, what with making a living and all. Neither of them had been raised in a world of books, either, and formal education, book learning, for both had been brief.
Though on second thought, I do remember one book, a tattered edition of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poems, that one in the house, no doubt, because my father, who came from Portland, Maine, said that Longfellow, another Portland native, formed a branch on the family tree. I’ve never found documentation supporting that, so it’s probably just a family myth. Anyway, “By the shores of Gitche Gumee …” has been a worm gnawing its way through my brain for as long as I can remember. Could one parent or the other have read it to me at some point before memory starts? Not likely, but perhaps. All through a childhood in arid West Texas, how I longed to see the “shining Big-Sea-Water,” whatever that might be.
I benefited from a West Texas Public School Standard education, not bad, I think, though not deluxe. I learned my cursive (mine never beautiful) and my multiplication tables, some Texas history and what passed there and then for science (no Evil Evolution, you can be relieved to hear). And reading. I always fell into the Level II reader group, “slow reader with faulty spelling, comprehension good.”
But without guidance at home, and not much more at school (Miss Gatewood, hardly out of teachers’ college when she taught me, might not, herself, have had a thorough grounding in the classics), I found myself adrift in the “Big-Sea-Water” of literature all alone. Sometime in the later 1950s, Reader’s Digest Condensed Books began to come in the mail. I remember the volumes, though I can’t actually remember ever reading them.
And I’ll never forget the look of puzzled wonder on the bookseller’s face when I bought a used copy of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Modern Library, early 1960s): “You like reading things like this?” (I never got beyond the first two paragraphs, of course, though much later I did muster interest in a footnote about one Emperor Elagabalus.
I must have read the usual classroom stuff in grade school and junior high, since I passed every year, with high enough marks. The first book I remember reading completely on my own – OK, teacher had assigned an oral book report, but I got to pick the book – was The Land of Foam, by Ivan Yefremov (Moscow, 1946; first English ed. 1957). Which, with precocious phonetic reading skill, I pronounced “Fo-am,” to the consternation of Miss Gatewood and my classmates.
Not one you’re familiar with? I’m not surprised. What does surprise me is that at the height of the Cold War in ultra conservative West Texas, I was allowed even to read, much less report on to the whole class, a novel by a Soviet Scientist writing historical (and, no doubt, subversive?) fiction. Such as that today would likely get me flunked and the teacher fired. But back then, I think I got an A for the assignment. Likely no one, including teacher, knew anything about such an evil, Commie book. Ah, the good old days.
I confess I don’t remember anything about the novel, or how I came to pick it. Reading the plot summary on Wikipedia, I see that it’s set in Pharaonic Egypt – I’ve always been fascinated by Pharaohs (it’s the hats, I think, and those weird chinny chin things) – and Ancient Aegean Greece. So perhaps the Big-Sea-Waters luring me again?
Once I got going at it, I did make up some ground as concerns reading. The Land of Foam fired my novel lust, and so I tore my way through the English Victorians, the towering Russians (Yefremov not withstanding), and some of the French. Proust eventually became something of an obsession. All in English, of course; I have no other language. Confession time, again, however: I’ve never read the Greeks or Romans, and I added another circle to Dante’s hell trying to read him (even in translation). So I know there are gaps in my reading that, at this age, I’ll never fill.
To state the fact, I’ve given up even trying. Now I hardly ever read anything new – unless it’s for historical research, which is reading, yes, but of a different sort. I’m not proud of that, but being realistic I’m not likely to change it either. I find comfort in reading familiar words, especially beautiful words, again and again. I’ve read Wharton’s Age of Innocence a dozen times, and cried every time.
Now that I think of it, I may start reading it again tonight, probably at 2 AM, which is when most of my reading now gets done. Reading at least as far, before I manage to fall back to sleep with the help of the comforting words, what is, for me, one of the greatest passages ever written, at least of the passages I’ve managed to read:
“An unalterable and unquestioned law of the musical world required that the German text of French operas sung by Swedish artists should be translated into Italian for the clearer understanding of English-speaking audiences.” Ah, yes, music to my ears, and eyes. Perfection!
Even Gitche Gumee can’t surpass that.
Wonderful post, Randy! It brought back similar memories for me, although my mother was and is an avid reader, and encouraged me to read books that were way, way above my "little" head.
This reminded me of the old K and G Drugstore (was that the name) on Bissonnet at Mandell in Houston (right down from your house). As kids we used to walk over from Milford St. and sit at the soda fountain and have a burger. I think we had an account. There was a comic book section and you weren't allowed to just sit on the floor and read the comics "unless you plan to buy them". Interestingly as I understand it, this drug store was where Larry McMurtry hung out while he was at Rice. Perhaps we crossed paths.