The Book

When you’re lost in a forest, all you can see is trees. When you’re drowning, all you can see when your head breaks the surface of the water is the next wave. When you’re a child in fear, all you can see is another thing to be afraid of – and then another thing, and another thing, on and on forever.

My life was dominated by fear. I was afraid to go to sleep at night because some unnamed horror might claim me for its own. I was afraid to wake up in the morning because pain came alive with the sun. I was afraid to go to school because I’d have to go home at the end of the day; I was afraid not to go to school because I’d have to stay home all day. I was afraid to go out and play because I’d have to go in when dusk fell. I was afraid of every noise I made: every hiccup, every sneeze, every cough. It seemed I could never stop attracting attention to myself, though I tried so hard to go through life without a ripple. The more I yearned to be invisible, the more visible I got.

I have no idea how I functioned under all that fear. That I ever played amazes me now. That I ever went out in the public eye and acted like a fairly normal child is a miracle. That I never, ever lost my natural inclination to giggle at every little thing astounds me. Nearly every day I fought for the right to have another day, another breath, and still I laughed. I laughed whenever I could. Any little thing would start it: a mad fit of chortling  that would grow and grow until I had to throw my head back and let it ring out of me at full volume. Laughter, for me, is like a bubble in my throat that suddenly bursts into a rainbow and has to escape. It’s a thousand tiny prisms of light that I cannot shutter. I’ve never seen any reason not to share them.

I feel my tears with equal emotion. Sorrow comes from the very pit of my belly and soaks into all my bones; I can’t contain it. When I weep, I am broken. I have to keen out all the little pieces of grief before I can put myself back together – I have to see everything in front of me before I know where it goes. Anger is the same. It comes rarely, but when it comes it is fast and hot. Rejection. Joy. Embarrassment. Excitement. Emotions roll through me so strongly, I can’t help but open the door and let them out. I know enough now to hold back when I must, but I am a tempest: I will fling wide the gates sooner or later, because if I keep them shut I will drown. I’ve always been that way. I have my passions; there’s no use in pretending I don’t, at least not these days.

As a child, I fought so hard to contain them that at times I thought I’d shatter. Don’t cry at the wrong time; don’t smile at the wrong time; don’t yell at the wrong time; don’t hope at the wrong time. As a matter of fact, never cry at all. Never yell. What are you smiling about? I’ll teach you to hope for something! Everything that made me human was something to fear. The only way I could survive was to push that fear as far back in my mind as it could possibly go and ignore it for as long as I could. Laughter helped me do that; laughter was the one thing that insisted upon being seen and heard when everything else was tamped and silent. After a while, I used it to express everything. Sad? Laugh. Angry? Laugh. Scared? Laugh. In all that you do, you must laugh. It’s laugh or die.

And so my childhood continued on, and I laughed in the face of my suffering.

In the third grade, I became familiar with the notion that there are things you don’t know you need until you have already gotten them. I had Mrs. Kaiser that year. She was the best teacher ever, hands down. I’ve known some good teachers, what with high school and two different doses of college, but Mrs. Kaiser beats them all. There was just something about her that drew me in. She was kind, always smiling or chuckling, and she had the best voice. She spoke like a warm fire on a snowy day, like hot soup when you’re sick. She was magnetic. It was a privilege to learn from her.

She read to us, too. I think that was the thing that cemented my adoration: the reading. I already loved books, but Mrs. Kaiser brought them to life in a way that even I didn’t know how to do. Every afternoon after recess, we’d sit down at our desks and Mrs. Kaiser would read. She read Hank the Cowdog books and books from The Boxcar Children series. She read Where the Red Fern Grows, which graces my bookshelf even all these years later – every time I read it, I laugh out loud at the memory of her describing Grandpa’s cold dance before the campfire in his long underwear in her merry, excited voice.

I loved reading time. I lived for reading time. As far as I was concerned, we could skip recess altogether and just spend all that time reading. Today, at 26, when I look back into my past to seek out some small comfort amid all the pain, it is Mrs. Kaiser and her books that comes up first. I’m sure she’s a large part of the reason behind my continued passion for reading. Walk into my apartment on any given day, and you will find piles and stacks and rows of books everywhere: on the shelf above the bed, on the dresser, on the desk, on the coffee table; sometimes even a book in the kitchen because I read and stir spaghetti at the same time. When I shake out the blankets to make up the bed, books fall out. I have books stacked under the T.V table and even in the closets because I’ve run out of places to put them. One of my biggest aspirations in this digital age is to teach the next generation the joy of a real book, something you can see and smell and hold in your hands, something that won’t get lost if your hard drive crashes or you drop your Kindle in the sink. I imagine having one entire room in a future home dedicated to a kind of community library: take a book, leave a book, read a book and love it.

I will never forget how I felt when Mrs. Kaiser told me I could bring in a book for her to read to the class. I was so excited, I almost popped! I could not make up my mind which book to take. This one? That one? Hardcover or paperback? One I’d read a hundred times, or one that I’d read only once? After much agonizing, I finally decided on Lois Lenski’s Indian Captive: the Story of Mary Jemison, a fictionalized account of a true story: a woman named Mary Jemison was captured in a raid as a young girl and brought up among the Seneca. It was such a good book, it made me squirm every time I thought about it. It was full of beautifully drawn illustrations, and I read it in one long gulp so many times that I can still remember whole lines of dialogue and the detail in some of the pictures.

To me, that book was a holy thing. It was one of my most prized possessions. I was worried that something awful might happen to it the second it left my hands, but I gave it over to be read because it meant more to entrust my beloved teacher with a book I treasured rather than one I merely liked. The rush I got when she opened my book and began to read nearly catapulted me to the moon. I felt special. I felt superior to my classmates for once: this time, I was the one with something someone else wanted. I was the one who had been picked for something exclusive. I was the one the teacher had asked for a book; kudos to me.

But even that, delicious as it was, wasn’t the best part. The best part was the sense I got that maybe, just maybe, I could do something right after all, that maybe I was a good girl and someone liked me and cared about me. On those afternoons during the reading of my precious book, I felt cradled and cherished and perfectly content. It was a feeling I would draw strength from for a very long time.