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Dream of a Reader

Some people dream of being a writer. I dreamed of being a reader.

When I was sixteen I worked at the library. My job was to take books back to the shelves, but sometimes I would check books out for people and I always noticed the titles that came through.  Always. 

You think that people who work at mundane jobs like that don’t notice who you are and what you are reading, but I noticed. I always noticed.  Sure there were plenty of people who would check out books held no interest.  House plans.  Car guides.  Remodeling ideas.  But most library patrons checked out stuff I loved to ask them about. And I sorted and categorized them all, my hierarchy of readers.  Lowest to highest brow.

There were the women who checked out grocery sacks jammed with paperback Harlequin romances.  Unembarrassed, these women would smile, and tell you that reading romances was an addiction, that they had to read them and that it only took an hour or so to finish most romances.  The women, I thought, were old and fat and ugly, but I envied them.  They had found time to read. 

These women, the readers, had hard lives once out of the sacred space of the library. Harder than any romance heroine had.  These women were married to ugly men of feeble intelligence who smelled of stale smoke and rancid sweat and went to strip clubs after work.  They had stupid and ugly children who brought bad grades home from school.  They had little yip yip dogs who pooped behind the sofa and shed on the sheets of their unmade beds. What on earth did the paperback romance readers have to live for?  They had food, I’m sure.  They probably ate only the finest in junk foods.  Corn chips.  Pop tarts.  Hostess products.  These could see you through the day.

But the books, that was what made life really worth getting up out of bed in the morning for.  To lose oneself in the sweet luxury of the printed page was better than real life any day. I believed then that I could live their lives, live any life at all as long as I could read.

Sometimes I would fantasize about the perfect life. Mine would be a quiet house, neatly kept, decorated with philodendrons and Venetian blinds. Small enough so that it wouldn’t take long to clean. Maybe I would have a cat, a fat and lazy purring pussy who waited for me all day until I came home and who greeted me with mews and who rubbed my ankles with his face.  I would spoil him on wet canned food  Maybe even an aquarium.  But I wouldn’t want to live with anyone else unless they too just sat around and read books all day.   I could smoke cigarettes, play solitaire on a fold up card table and drink. 
Then I’d reach into my grocery sack of books and start turning pages. A cup of tea, a blanket, a small lamp, and a stack of books. They would sleep next to me on my pillow,  and keep me warm. Small round soft novels.  I could have devoted my life to reading.  Not teaching, or writing about books.  Just reading.  I would arrange my life so that I could read more than do anything else.

I wouldn’t have to talk to anyone about anything else.  Books and bed and cat and drink and cigarettes.  I knew then that the secret to happiness was to keep my expectations high for the books I read, and settle low for everything else.

Then life interrupted.  There were places to go, drugs to take, and boys to meet.  I blame the drugs and sex all on the 700’s.  If I hadn’t started looking at art books (photography in particular), then I would have been happy to live a vicarious life through description and dialogue. But the 770’s showed me in heady contrast of black and white, faces, shadows, horizons, the experience of a world that I believed was beyond words, there was a now-ness that I was missing in the books. 

The 770’s taught me that there were senses that I needed to experience first hand.  If I had spent my youth turning pages, away, I wouldn’t have anything to look forward to in old age.  Why use it all up now? 

So I went out into the world.  But it didn't take long, I came back.

Because then there was fiction, always there to offer another set of circumstances. An alternate universe peopled with adorable, if not also despicable characters whose troubles grew wilder with each passing chapter, whose flaws made them lovable, whose  lives made sense in the end. Better than television, which too is always there, the books offer a more complete escape.  Sometimes the promise of the cover and the title alone would be enough.

That’s the best part about getting older, there's always something new to learn, new shelves to explore, new books to check out.  When I was young I had trouble finding books that I wanted to read. Now, I have trouble leaving the library before my arms become so laden with books that I cannot leave.  Sometimes I have to lie and tell the clerks at circulation that I am a teacher  part and that I am carrying my teacher’s collection back to school.  I may be carrying my collection, and I may be a teacher, but I wouldn't be going back to school.  I would carry them with me home, to the kitchen, to the couch, to my bed and be happy. 

Why not be happy? The universe, and all of knowledge, and all of the knowledge about knowledge has been neatly wrapped within Dewey’s Decimals and lay waiting for me on the shelves.  The gods created the stars.  And they put them in the 500's.  And the gods created stories about themselves.  And they shelved them in the 398s.  And the gods created history and travel and biography and these became the 900’s. And when the gods found books about books he could not find a place to put them because they didn’t fit anywhere else, so the gods created the 000’s.  And that is where ghosts and computer languages and the UFO’s stay, too.  Makes sense if you think about it in an ironically metaphoric 800’s sort of way.

And no matter how bad the world gets, there is always hope.  Hope like that of the elderly library patron, searching, searching, searching the shelves for that perfect book, settling for one that speaks to you, then reading. And with this hope there is the promise of connecting with a book, melding with the mind of another, sitting in a chair with the words like whispers the author’s voice in your ear, his pen, all that work, all that refinement, all those revisions, are carefully created for you. And do you know what?  Your writer, the one who writes for you, who is speaking directly to you.  You as an individual.  That’s right you.  Your writer doesn’t care what you look like or how smart you are or how much money you make.  All she wants to do is to communicate with you.  She doesn’t know any thing about you and then, she knows all about this experience that she is having with you right now.  You are connecting with her.  This is profound, this connection.   It makes your heart sing if you feel its fullness.  Even bad writers connect with you at some level, but think of the good writers.  Think of the historical writers.  They are communicating with you. They are dead and they speak in your ear.  Quiet as the carpet and colorful and textured, are their words.   is such a fine and sublime pleasure that it can make all the rest of life’s horrors meaningless, as long as you are able to get a book, have the eyes to read, and are well enough fed to read, and you are safe enough to read, and your wits are still about you then you can live and you can live fully.  And you, as long as you are reading, justify the toil and the pain that the poor author spent on you .  You are his darling.  He is in love with you and he writes for you, dear.  You with your ostoporotic hump and your thin age spotted skin.  He doesn’t care about all that.  All he wants from you is for you to listen.  And the book is long.  He will be there with you for hours upon hours.

And you have many of these lovers.  Thousands.  Men and women alike compete for your attention.  Young and old, dead and alive.  They sit on shelves and beg you to take them down and to hold them in your hands. Take them all.  Share your pillow with them and sleep with them.  Let their words enter you and become a secret on your lips.  The words of the author will not betray you.  They love you so.