Once Upon a Time...

Ten years ago, as a part of my parents’ divorce settlement, my father insisted on collecting family “memorabilia.” Not being particularly inclined to part with my own memorabilia, one night, on a college break and with an evening to myself, I painstakingly filtered through old VHS cassettes, trying to keep what “we” could (for my mother’s sake, mostly, was how I justified my parsimonious attitude). So, for the entire night, I fast-forwarded through and rewound again live childhood images. Thankfully, most of the tapes had been recorded by my father, whose visual presence I desired to eliminate altogether from the screen. But as tends to happen when things are trying to be wished away, suddenly and without warning, there he was in front of me.

The four of us sat on a couch – my father, my two younger brothers, and me – and the camera was evidently being supported by a tripod. I was around four, old enough to be reading aloud; the boys were squirmy and not yet two. My father sat between his sons and his daughter, his eyes looking sideways at the book in her hand but mostly forward at the camera. “Come on,” he intoned, “you know what to do.” “I know Daddy, I know. I say it right.” “Say it right or what, LM?” “Say it right or I get whacks.”

I watched that scene and, at eighteen years old, for the first time became physically ill due to something I knew had no immediate physical cause.

I don’t know when I stopped reading for pleasure. Because at one time reading was my one of my only pleasures. I do know that I spent a lot of time in my junior high school years silently and mentally referring to myself in the third person, as if I were a character in a book, so that I could effectively handle the experiences with which I was faced at home. “She stepped off of the school bus and trudged across the lawn to the side-front door, where she knew the mother-figure would be awaiting her. She wondered how to ask for the snack that she might need, and if not, if she should dump her backpack in the hallway and quickly retreat to the bathroom, trying to discern the mood of the mother-figure and then what she should do next.” I know that I also read then as an “escape” – and that somewhere I began reading books about people my age I wished I could be. The Babysitters Club eventually moved to Sweet Valley High, yet those were entertaining books, and I still relished the words and the structure of the books assigned in school – A Tale of Two Cities quickly comes to mind.

Now, I am envious of my peers, friends, colleagues, acquaintances who still read for enjoyment. There are a number of reasons I can immediately put up as to why I don’t do the same (such as a limited attention span), but writing and reading are something at which I used to be – so said my teachers – quite talented, and which I miss.

I don’t have that iron fist (pun not initially intended, but accepted) in the form of my father governing the necessity that I read perfectly any longer, but its implications might be further reaching than I understand. One of the first steps towards this understanding is probably admitting its existence, and, in a little way, I have just done so right now.