Neil Gaiman: Why our future depends on libraries, reading and daydreaming

Article Link–

Neil Gaiman gives The Reading Agency annual lecture on the future of reading and libraries.

Photograph: Robin Mayes

It’s important for people to tell you what side they are on and why, and whether they might be biased. A declaration of members’ interests, of a sort. So, I am going to be talking to you about reading. I’m going to tell you that libraries are important. I’m going to suggest that reading fiction, that reading for pleasure, is one of the most important things one can do. I’m going to make an impassioned plea for people to understand what libraries and librarians are, and to preserve both of these things.

And I am biased, obviously and enormously: I’m an author, often an author of fiction. I write for children and for adults. For about 30 years I have been earning my living though my words, mostly by making things up and writing them down. It is obviously in my interest for people to read, for them to read fiction, for libraries and librarians to exist and help foster a love of reading and places in which reading can occur.

So I’m biased as a writer. But I am much, much more biased as a reader. And I am even more biased as a British citizen.

And I’m here giving this talk tonight, under the auspices of the Reading Agency: a charity whose mission is to give everyone an equal chance in life by helping people become confident and enthusiastic readers. Which supports literacy programs, and libraries and individuals and nakedly and wantonly encourages the act of reading. Because, they tell us, everything changes when we read.

And it’s that change, and that act of reading that I’m here to talk about tonight. I want to talk about what reading does. What it’s good for.

I was once in New York, and I listened to a talk about the building of private prisons – a huge growth industry in America. The prison industry needs to plan its future growth – how many cells are they going to need? How many prisoners are there going to be, 15 years from now? And they found they could predict it very easily, using a pretty simple algorithm, based on asking what percentage of 10 and 11-year-olds couldn’t read. And certainly couldn’t read for pleasure.

It’s not one to one: you can’t say that a literate society has no criminality. But there are very real correlations.

And I think some of those correlations, the simplest, come from something very simple. Literate people read fiction.

Fiction has two uses. Firstly, it’s a gateway drug to reading. The drive to know what happens next, to want to turn the page, the need to keep going, even if it’s hard, because someone’s in trouble and you have to know how it’s all going to end … that’s a very real drive. And it forces you to learn new words, to think new thoughts, to keep going. To discover that reading per se is pleasurable. Once you learn that, you’re on the road to reading everything. And reading is key. There were noises made briefly, a few years ago, about the idea that we were living in a post-literate world, in which the ability to make sense out of written words was somehow redundant, but those days are gone: words are more important than they ever were: we navigate the world with words, and as the world slips onto the web, we need to follow, to communicate and to comprehend what we are reading. People who cannot understand each other cannot exchange ideas, cannot communicate, and translation programs only go so far.

The simplest way to make sure that we raise literate children is to teach them to read, and to show them that reading is a pleasurable activity. And that means, at its simplest, finding books that they enjoy, giving them access to those books, and letting them read them.

I don’t think there is such a thing as a bad book for children. Every now and again it becomes fashionable among some adults to point at a subset of children’s books, a genre, perhaps, or an author, and to declare them bad books, books that children should be stopped from reading. I’ve seen it happen over and over; Enid Blyton was declared a bad author, so was RL Stine, so were dozens of others. Comics have been decried as fostering illiteracy.

No such thing as a bad writer… Enid Blyton’s Famous Five. Photograph: Greg Balfour Evans/Alamy
It’s tosh. It’s snobbery and it’s foolishness. There are no bad authors for children, that children like and want to read and seek out, because every child is different. They can find the stories they need to, and they bring themselves to stories. A hackneyed, worn-out idea isn’t hackneyed and worn out to them. This is the first time the child has encountered it. Do not discourage children from reading because you feel they are reading the wrong thing. Fiction you do not like is a route to other books you may prefer. And not everyone has the same taste as you.

Well-meaning adults can easily destroy a child’s love of reading: stop them reading what they enjoy, or give them worthy-but-dull books that you like, the 21st-century equivalents of Victorian “improving” literature. You’ll wind up with a generation convinced that reading is uncool and worse, unpleasant.

We need our children to get onto the reading ladder: anything that they enjoy reading will move them up, rung by rung, into literacy. (Also, do not do what this author did when his 11-year-old daughter was into RL Stine, which is to go and get a copy of Stephen King’s Carrie, saying if you liked those you’ll love this! Holly read nothing but safe stories of settlers on prairies for the rest of her teenage years, and still glares at me when Stephen King’s name is mentioned.)

And the second thing fiction does is to build empathy. When you watch TV or see a film, you are looking at things happening to other people. Prose fiction is something you build up from 26 letters and a handful of punctuation marks, and you, and you alone, using your imagination, create a world and people it and look out through other eyes. You get to feel things, visit places and worlds you would never otherwise know. You learn that everyone else out there is a me, as well. You’re being someone else, and when you return to your own world, you’re going to be slightly changed.

Empathy is a tool for building people into groups, for allowing us to function as more than self-obsessed individuals.

You’re also finding out something as you read vitally important for making your way in the world. And it’s this:

The world doesn’t have to be like this. Things can be different.

I was in China in 2007, at the first party-approved science fiction andfantasy convention in Chinese history. And at one point I took a top official aside and asked him Why? SF had been disapproved of for a long time. What had changed?

It’s simple, he told me. The Chinese were brilliant at making things if other people brought them the plans. But they did not innovate and they did not invent. They did not imagine. So they sent a delegation to the US, to Apple, to Microsoft, to Google, and they asked the people there who were inventing the future about themselves. And they found that all of them had read science fiction when they were boys or girls.

Fiction can show you a different world. It can take you somewhere you’ve never been. Once you’ve visited other worlds, like those who ate fairy fruit, you can never be entirely content with the world that you grew up in. Discontent is a good thing: discontented people can modify and improve their worlds, leave them better, leave them different.

And while we’re on the subject, I’d like to say a few words about escapism. I hear the term bandied about as if it’s a bad thing. As if “escapist” fiction is a cheap opiate used by the muddled and the foolish and the deluded, and the only fiction that is worthy, for adults or for children, is mimetic fiction, mirroring the worst of the world the reader finds herself in.

If you were trapped in an impossible situation, in an unpleasant place, with people who meant you ill, and someone offered you a temporary escape, why wouldn’t you take it? And escapist fiction is just that: fiction that opens a door, shows the sunlight outside, gives you a place to go where you are in control, are with people you want to be with(and books are real places, make no mistake about that); and more importantly, during your escape, books can also give you knowledge about the world and your predicament, give you weapons, give you armour: real things you can take back into your prison. Skills and knowledge and tools you can use to escape for real.

As JRR Tolkien reminded us, the only people who inveigh against escape are jailers.

Tolkien’s illustration of Bilbo’s home, Bag End. Photograph: HarperCollinsAnother way to destroy a child’s love of reading, of course, is to make sure there are no books of any kind around. And to give them nowhere to read those books. I was lucky. I had an excellent local library growing up. I had the kind of parents who could be persuaded to drop me off in the library on their way to work in summer holidays, and the kind of librarians who did not mind a small, unaccompanied boy heading back into the children’s library every morning and working his way through the card catalogue, looking for books with ghosts or magic or rockets in them, looking for vampires or detectives or witches or wonders. And when I had finished reading the children’s’ library I began on the adult books.

They were good librarians. They liked books and they liked the books being read. They taught me how to order books from other libraries on inter-library loans. They had no snobbery about anything I read. They just seemed to like that there was this wide-eyed little boy who loved to read, and would talk to me about the books I was reading, they would find me other books in a series, they would help. They treated me as another reader – nothing less or more – which meant they treated me with respect. I was not used to being treated with respect as an eight-year-old.

But libraries are about freedom. Freedom to read, freedom of ideas, freedom of communication. They are about education (which is not a process that finishes the day we leave school or university), about entertainment, about making safe spaces, and about access to information.

I worry that here in the 21st century people misunderstand what libraries are and the purpose of them. If you perceive a library as a shelf of books, it may seem antiquated or outdated in a world in which most, but not all, books in print exist digitally. But that is to miss the point fundamentally.

I think it has to do with nature of information. Information has value, and the right information has enormous value. For all of human history, we have lived in a time of information scarcity, and having the needed information was always important, and always worth something: when to plant crops, where to find things, maps and histories and stories – they were always good for a meal and company. Information was a valuable thing, and those who had it or could obtain it could charge for that service.

In the last few years, we’ve moved from an information-scarce economy to one driven by an information glut. According to Eric Schmidt of Google, every two days now the human race creates as much information as we did from the dawn of civilisation until 2003. That’s about five exobytes of data a day, for those of you keeping score. The challenge becomes, not finding that scarce plant growing in the desert, but finding a specific plant growing in a jungle. We are going to need help navigating that information to find the thing we actually need.

Photograph: AlamyLibraries are places that people go to for information. Books are only the tip of the information iceberg: they are there, and libraries can provide you freely and legally with books. More children are borrowing books from libraries than ever before – books of all kinds: paper and digital and audio. But libraries are also, for example, places that people, who may not have computers, who may not haveinternet connections, can go online without paying anything: hugely important when the way you find out about jobs, apply for jobs or apply for benefits is increasingly migrating exclusively online. Librarians can help these people navigate that world.

I do not believe that all books will or should migrate onto screens: as Douglas Adams once pointed out to me, more than 20 years before the Kindle turned up, a physical book is like a shark. Sharks are old: there were sharks in the ocean before the dinosaurs. And the reason there are still sharks around is that sharks are better at being sharks than anything else is. Physical books are tough, hard to destroy, bath-resistant, solar-operated, feel good in your hand: they are good at being books, and there will always be a place for them. They belong in libraries, just as libraries have already become places you can go to get access to ebooks, and audiobooks and DVDs and web content.

A library is a place that is a repository of information and gives every citizen equal access to it. That includes health information. And mental health information. It’s a community space. It’s a place of safety, a haven from the world. It’s a place with librarians in it. What the libraries of the future will be like is something we should be imagining now.

Literacy is more important than ever it was, in this world of text and email, a world of written information. We need to read and write, we need global citizens who can read comfortably, comprehend what they are reading, understand nuance, and make themselves understood.

Libraries really are the gates to the future. So it is unfortunate that, round the world, we observe local authorities seizing the opportunity to close libraries as an easy way to save money, without realising that they are stealing from the future to pay for today. They are closing the gates that should be open.

According to a recent study by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, England is the “only country where the oldest age group has higher proficiency in both literacy and numeracy than the youngest group, after other factors, such as gender, socio-economic backgrounds and type of occupations are taken into account”.

Or to put it another way, our children and our grandchildren are less literate and less numerate than we are. They are less able to navigate the world, to understand it to solve problems. They can be more easily lied to and misled, will be less able to change the world in which they find themselves, be less employable. All of these things. And as a country, England will fall behind other developed nations because it will lack a skilled workforce.

Books are the way that we communicate with the dead. The way that we learn lessons from those who are no longer with us, that humanity has built on itself, progressed, made knowledge incremental rather than something that has to be relearned, over and over. There are tales that are older than most countries, tales that have long outlasted the cultures and the buildings in which they were first told.

I think we have responsibilities to the future. Responsibilities and obligations to children, to the adults those children will become, to the world they will find themselves inhabiting. All of us – as readers, as writers, as citizens – have obligations. I thought I’d try and spell out some of these obligations here.

I believe we have an obligation to read for pleasure, in private and in public places. If we read for pleasure, if others see us reading, then we learn, we exercise our imaginations. We show others that reading is a good thing.

We have an obligation to support libraries. To use libraries, to encourage others to use libraries, to protest the closure of libraries. If you do not value libraries then you do not value information or culture or wisdom. You are silencing the voices of the past and you are damaging the future.

We have an obligation to read aloud to our children. To read them things they enjoy. To read to them stories we are already tired of. To do the voices, to make it interesting, and not to stop reading to them just because they learn to read to themselves. Use reading-aloud time as bonding time, as time when no phones are being checked, when the distractions of the world are put aside.

We have an obligation to use the language. To push ourselves: to find out what words mean and how to deploy them, to communicate clearly, to say what we mean. We must not to attempt to freeze language, or to pretend it is a dead thing that must be revered, but we should use it as a living thing, that flows, that borrows words, that allows meanings and pronunciations to change with time.

We writers – and especially writers for children, but all writers – have an obligation to our readers: it’s the obligation to write true things, especially important when we are creating tales of people who do not exist in places that never were – to understand that truth is not in what happens but what it tells us about who we are. Fiction is the lie that tells the truth, after all. We have an obligation not to bore our readers, but to make them need to turn the pages. One of the best cures for a reluctant reader, after all, is a tale they cannot stop themselves from reading. And while we must tell our readers true things and give them weapons and give them armour and pass on whatever wisdom we have gleaned from our short stay on this green world, we have an obligation not to preach, not to lecture, not to force predigested morals and messages down our readers’ throats like adult birds feeding their babies pre-masticated maggots; and we have an obligation never, ever, under any circumstances, to write anything for children that we would not want to read ourselves.

We have an obligation to understand and to acknowledge that as writers for children we are doing important work, because if we mess it up and write dull books that turn children away from reading and from books, we ‘ve lessened our own future and diminished theirs.

We all – adults and children, writers and readers – have an obligation to daydream. We have an obligation to imagine. It is easy to pretend that nobody can change anything, that we are in a world in which society is huge and the individual is less than nothing: an atom in a wall, a grain of rice in a rice field. But the truth is, individuals change their world over and over, individuals make the future, and they do it by imagining that things can be different.

Look around you: I mean it. Pause, for a moment and look around the room that you are in. I’m going to point out something so obvious that it tends to be forgotten. It’s this: that everything you can see, including the walls, was, at some point, imagined. Someone decided it was easier to sit on a chair than on the ground and imagined the chair. Someone had to imagine a way that I could talk to you in London right now without us all getting rained on.This room and the things in it, and all the other things in this building, this city, exist because, over and over and over, people imagined things.

We have an obligation to make things beautiful. Not to leave the world uglier than we found it, not to empty the oceans, not to leave our problems for the next generation. We have an obligation to clean up after ourselves, and not leave our children with a world we’ve shortsightedly messed up, shortchanged, and crippled.

We have an obligation to tell our politicians what we want, to vote against politicians of whatever party who do not understand the value of reading in creating worthwhile citizens, who do not want to act to preserve and protect knowledge and encourage literacy. This is not a matter of party politics. This is a matter of common humanity.

Albert Einstein was asked once how we could make our children intelligent. His reply was both simple and wise. “If you want your children to be intelligent,” he said, “read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales.” He understood the value of reading, and of imagining. I hope we can give our children a world in which they will read, and be read to, and imagine, and understand.

• This is an edited version of Neil Gaiman‘s lecture for the Reading Agency, delivered on Monday October 14 at the Barbican in London. The Reading Agency’s annual lecture series was initiated in 2012 as a platform for leading writers and thinkers to share original, challenging ideas about reading and libraries.

The Rainstorm

 

The Rainstorm

Oh! that you could turn your eyes towards the napes of your necks, and make but an interior survey of your good selves. ~William Shakespeare, “Coriolanus”

The library is usually quiet, but today, it is filled with commotion. I am huddled at my customary table with my computer and stack of books, determined to write. To be productive. I left home to escape the perpetual evanescence of my three children, who wake at eight o’clock each morning, dinging brightly like miniature summertime bells. “What are we doing today, mom?”, ding. “Can we play in the sprinklers?”, dong. “Who ate the last red popsicle? You said I could have it!”, ding, dong! “I don’t want to take the dog for a walk, I might get kidnapped!”, ding, dong, ding, DONG!

Clearly, I picked the wrong day to seek refuge in the library. Silence and peace are maddeningly evasive. A man in khaki shorts and blazingly white sneakers is copying the phone book, page by page, at an ancient Xerox machine. As it whirs, clicks and spits out sheet after sheet of paper, the noise sets my mind on high alert, exquisitely highlighting every other sound in the room. The bathroom door, opening and closing. Someone at the drinking fountain.

Nearby, a freckled boy walks in ever tightening circles, wearing neon green, froggy faced flip flops. Thwap, thwap, thwap. “Can I check out these books, mommy? Please?” His huge pile of picture books falls from his arms in slow motion, ending in a slippery heap at his tiny, froggy clad feet. He begins to cry, a slow crescendo at first, building into a loud, lusty wail. “It’s ok, sweetie. Let’s pick them up together.” Snuffle, snuffle. Flop, flop. 

Where are the shushing, tut-tutting librarians? Where, in God’s name, is my peace and quiet? Certainly not in the library. Not today, at least.

A black beetle appears suddenly, flying in just over my left shoulder. It lands Kamikaze style on the white, glossy surface of my computer. Six tiny legs flailing in defeat, black abdomen and thorax flexing and heaving with the effort of what I imagine was his final, erratic flight. The beetle looks how I feel. Exhausted. Overwrought. This feels like a bad omen.

Did the incessant noise drive him mad? Did he just commit hari-kari on my MacBook Air? He’s not gonna make it, poor bugger. “Sorry, little guy. It’s hopeless.” Here, allow me to end your misery. Flick.

Franz Kafka, regarded by many as one of the most influential novelists of the twentieth century, knew the importance of solitude and silence, not only to the creative process, but to the health and well being of our souls. Without ready, regular doses of tranquility, Kafka understood that humanity risks tracing the erratic path of that black beetle who gave up his life on my trackpad. If we live surrounded by constant noise and tumult, we are virtually guaranteed to become exhausted by the ceaseless rhythm of life, doomed to living lives of repeated failure. Crash landings, hard falls and upside down flailing in unfamiliar surroundings.

No matter our place in the world, we must find time within our tiny spheres to rest, find tranquility and be still.

In order to find silence and rest, Kafka said, “You need not leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. You need not even listen, simply wait, just learn to become quiet, and still, and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked. It has no choice; it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.”

Unfortunately, Kafka’s brilliant words leave a gaping hole where my life and current affairs are concerned.  If, for argument’s sake, I decided to stay in my room, waiting dutifully for the universe to unfold in ecstatic glory at my feet, the results would be disappointing at best. In the worst case, I’d be left waiting for the barest crumb of silence so long, some unfortunate soul might find me mummified, head propped in my dusty hands, sixty years or so from now. That’s how loud my house is. Ever tried living under the same roof with with three kids, a workaholic husband and kinetic puppy? It’s not easy to find silence in my abode.

Still, I would not trade places with Kafka, who was a bachelor and who, I imagine, did not have to battle for moments of solitude as I do. Not for all the silence in the world. For one, he was a bit of a loon. Some say he suffered from schizoid personality disorder, others that he was an anxious, depressed sex addict. Even if he was entirely normal (and simply morose, like so many great writers and people I know), what he gained in solitude he likely would have lost in the chaotic, joyous hubbub being part of a large, loving family often entails.

Perhaps Kafka and I don’t share much in common. But, then again, Kafka was preoccupied with existential visions of metamorphosing bugs. Maybe we have more in common than I’d like to admit, me with my kamikaze beetles, bad omens and a growing preoccupation with finding silence. In the end, we both agree that solitude is an essential building block for creativity, peace and the regeneration of our souls.

Even if it does make me sound bit loony, in a Kafka-esqe sort of way, I freely admit that excessive noise drives me up a tree. These days, noise seems to follow me everywhere I go, like a modern plague. People yell and yammer. About their jobs, exes, exercise routines and vacation plans. Their digestive ills, garden weevils and saddle bags. Perhaps I was British in another life. Aren’t some things better left unsaid, a few precious subjects best held close to the vest? Stiff upper lip and all that? (Or not. Allow me to demonstrate, for your continued enjoyment, the fine art of the over share.)

A Frenchman I met recently remarked that while Americans are tremendously friendly, generous and kind-hearted, we often move to the nitty-gritty, disconcerting details of our personal lives with alarming speed. “Did I tell you that I had surgery last week. This little donut pillow is a life saver!”

I often wonder if one particular event turned me into a silence hog. But there isn’t one particularly loud, obnoxious day I can recall that sent me over the edge. Instead, after turning thirty and birthing two of my three children, sounds of all kinds began to disturb me intensely, for no good reason at all. Perhaps pregnancy messed with the delicate workings of my inner ear. Maybe having babies, combined with an intense lack of sleep, drove me a bit mad, and it stuck.

Whatever the case may be, now that I’m nearing forty, I can’t even manage a car ride and conversation when the radio is playing in the background. Some people can converse, knit, watch television and perform minor surgery, all while whipping up a batch of spaghetti sauce and performing Lady Macbeth’s soliloquy. That person is decidedly not me. If you try to converse with me while music is playing in the background and we’re riding in a vehicle of any sort, my head just might catch on fire and explode. You’ve been duly warned. 

My need for quiet and solitude intensified when I became a mother, then again when I became a writer. My children, the noisy, lovable little louts, demand constant attention. This is as it should be, but it doesn’t make the commotion they trail in their wakes any easier to bear when a moment of tranquil solitude is in order. They cry, talk or otherwise make their presence known from the moment they wake in the morning till their sweet heads hit the pillow at night. “Mom, I’m hungry. I have to go potty. Did you know Nikola Tesla was friends with Mark Twain? The dog pooped under your bed. Why can’t we have steak for dinner like the Lees? I’m hungry!”

When my children were small, finding fragments of silence in the midst of the everyday was easier. Each afternoon, I’d lead them towards their rooms as they protested, “But I’m not tired!” Then, handing over their binkie, bottle or blankie (sometimes all three, depending on the child), I’d send them off to sleep with a story, kiss and cuddle. Only then could I revel in a few precious hours of peace and quiet. It didn’t matter if I had work to finish, a mountain of laundry to fold or toilets and floors to scrub. A house with a child napping inside stilled my heart in an otherworldly manner which defied the very laws of gravity. A napping child is so serene that their tranquility is capable of pulling me in, like a super nova or exploding star. Even my restless, cluttered mind could not resist the force of my children’s untroubled daytime slumbers.

But as they grew, my children did a terrible thing. They stopped napping. Even worse, they became teenagers, and began staying up past my bedtime. These days, long after I’ve drifted off to sleep with a book propped upon my chest, I hear strains of Breaking Bad or The Walking Dead floating up the stairs. “You still up?”, I holler. “Yeah, mom. Go back to sleep. I’ve got to finish this one thing. I’ll be up soon.” Now, I have difficulty finding peace during the day and have a hard time finding tranquility at night. 

Friends with older children warn me, often with a vicious gleam in their eyes, “Just wait till they get their licenses. You’ll never sleep again.” Holy Mary, Mother of God, is there no rest for the wicked? I thought having a newborn was exhausting, but now I’d give anything to go back to those days, when my little ones couldn’t crawl, run or otherwise escape my grasp, and they could be easily pacified with bottle, breast or a ride in the car. That, plus they slept eighteen hours a day. Now you’re telling me it just gets worse? 

In my current stage of life, surrounded with constant noise and busyness, I increasingly find I can’t think straight. This makes finding moments of rest and silence more important than ever, as stringing thoughts together coherently is an important part of my job. My children do go outside to play and head off to school occasionally, which ought to give me a break. But, sad to say, my mind won’t turn off, even when they are away from home.

Like a fretful shepherd, I am forever on alert, whether my brood is in the cul de sac riding bikes or out skinning their knees on the playground at school. Making pancakes, signing permission slips and packing lunches, I number my flock while scanning the hills for proverbial wolves. “One, two, three. Everyone’s accounted for. Where is Ava? There, in the neighbor’s tree. Ah, crap, she can’t get down. Dammit, who went to school without underwear?”

Therein lies the crux of the problem; I am in desperate need of silence and quiet at regularly spaced intervals throughout the day or I begin to develop problems. Serious ones. Eye twitches. Depression. A deep seated longing for the life of a cave dwelling hermit. I crave silence amid the noise and uproar of my life like a junkie craves crank or a bird craves flight. Without it, I become ornery, ugly, stupid and refuse to pluck my chin hairs. “What’s that you were saying? You want a bagel with cream cheese? I’m the bees knees? Kill me please? OK, fine. Whatever.” 

Clearly, I am in need of an extended vacation, a panic room or nanny. Time at an abbey in the Alps, where everyone takes a temporary vow of silence, would do my heart a world of good. Maybe this strikes you as crazy or selfish. If it does, please do not call my husband (or me, for that matter). Maybe it’s all in my head and I need to take a chill pill. But the fact remains; I can’t stand noise. So sue me. (Actually, please, don’t do that.)

Back at the library, readying myself to leave after the beetle’s untimely death, I heard a young mother’s voice rising several octaves. I didn’t need to see her face to know she was reaching critical core temperature and was about to blow.

 “Put the book back, Abby, it’s starting to storm and we still need to stop at the grocery store.” As if on cue, thunder rumbled ominously, shaking the glass panes of the library. Weather alerts began going off on cell phones all around the building. “Flash flood warning! Severe weather alert!” Batten down the hatches!

Everyone in the library grew skittish as the sky turned black and the winds picked up. Everyone, that is, but the little girl who was still resolutely clutching the book to her chest, oblivious to both the impending storm and her mother’s growing distress. 

“But this is my favorite book, mommy, ‘Everybody Farts’! Remember? The one with the dog. Who FARTS!” The little girl began to look damp and crestfallen. But her mother took on the black look of the hari-kari beetle, poking from around the edges of her eerily calm demeanor. Dangerous. Frenetic. 

But, like Marcel Marceau at his finest, her face suddenly shifted to a mask of peace, patience and serenity. All for the benefit her small, hopeful daughter. “OK, but we’ve got to hurry. Step up on the stool so you can check the book out yourself.” 

 Before the pair hurried towards their car, I tapped the mother on her shoulder. “You’re an amazing mom.” Her eyes filled with tears. Mothers are in need of appreciation, especially ones who willingly stop to check out books about farting dogs during epic summer thunder storms. Then, I looked at the little girl.  “Is your mommy going to read you this book tonight?”  Wide eyes, damp hair plastered across her brow, the little girl nodded shyly. “That will be fun. I bet that dog is stinky! But, I’ll bet you’re mama’s so sweet, her farts smell like cotton candy!” Smiles and giggles all around as they ran through the parking lot, huddled together in the pouring rain.

From the library windows, I saw a tiny patch of blue sky clinging hopefully to the easternmost edge of the horizon. Near the mountains, angry black storm clouds forced their way across the western slope. As forecasted, the summer storm brought sheets of rain, dime sized hail and a vicious wind that lifted a hazy film of dust off the quiet summer streets in a quick and savage whirlwind.

The library crowd thinned to all but a few patrons. Everyone else wanted to beat the storm and get their cars safely into their garages before hail dented their hoods into hundreds of tiny round hollows. “Whew, that storm came on fast. Sure is nice to be home. Anyone want soup for dinner?” I felt suddenly ready to pack up my things and head home. Ready to return to the less than quiet, loving tumult of my waiting family. Perhaps we’d order pizza, watch a movie and wait for the vivid rainbows which almost always appear like magic after Colorado thunder storms. Double rainbows, sometimes.

Artwork: Sascalia

 

Roadmap To Your Soul

Going Home

 

“Home is where the heart can laugh without shyness. Home is where they heart’s tears can dry at their own pace.” Vernon Baker

Our plane touches down at one in the morning, and I text my best friend of 28 years, “We landed thirty minutes early. Colorado tail wind!” My children, unaccustomed to air travel, do not understand why planes take longer to unload than school busses. “It’s hot. Why aren’t these people moving?” My five year old’s Thomas the Train blanket is coiled around his head like a fleece turban, his eyes glazed with exhaustion. Wedged between his eleven year old sister and fourteen year old brother, he is conked in the head by her purple flowered backpack and his big brother’s navy duffel bag as the older ones tussle for precious open space in the aisle way. “Move over, idiot! I need to stand up and stretch my legs!” 

Leaning in close, I smell my daughter’s freshly washed hair and wish I could scoop them all up and tuck them in bed. They are worn out, hot, tired. Ready for cool sheets and a long sleep.  But at the moment, threats are in order because we must get off the plane without incident and I’ve run out of Skittles and all other believable bribes. “You see that guy giving us the stink eye? I think he’s an air marshall, which means he has zip ties and a gun in his pocket. So I’d put a sock in it, before he hauls you off the plane in handcuffs.”  All but the little one, who simply wants to lean his head against my belly and rest, look alarmed, and promptly stop shoving each other.

But my oldest son is swaying, looking hot and flushed, as if he’s about to have a heatstroke. The stewardess strapped in her jump seat, calmly sipping a diet Dr. Pepper and tapping away on her iPad, ignores the mass of sweaty, irritated passengers. “Any chance you could turn on the AC?” She flashes a tight lipped smile in my general direction, the signature, “screw you, lady,” look of disdain made famous by the young, overworked and childless. “I’ll phone the flight deck and see what I can do.” 

Yes, that would be wise. Before the woman in 26B has a panic attack. She’s complaining loudly, to no one in particular, that she can’t control her core temperature because she had her ovaries and uterus removed four prior to our flight. And, she shouldn’t have ordered the caramel mocha before the flight because dairy always gives her gas. It is now easily one hundred and ten degrees in the cabin. Apparently they are hatching chicks on the plane. 

Ten lifetimes later, we emerge into the florescent coolness of the nearly deserted airport, and zig zag towards our waiting Metro Car. Ground transportation, God bless you. In an hour, we’ll be at my best friend’s childhood home and for six days, we will swim in her pool, wake to blueberry pancakes, eggs and bacon and watch her parents dote on all of our children, her two tiny ones and my three medium ones. 

Her home was my second home and had been since childhood. When my own parents died, her mother and father stepped up, generously giving me an anchor and place of refuge. They knew I would not last long without a repository for memories, a nest to fly home to when my own felt hollow and cold.

From memory, I tell the driver their address. Forty five minutes, if he drives quickly and my children will be tucked under the same blankets we used when we were gangly seventh graders giggling over boys. When I cried myself to sleep after the sudden death of my sister, and hid from the home I wasn’t always ready to return to. Dreaming the peaceful sleep that is possible when you know you are safe, as the future rolled towards me with its diaphanous edges and gently lit hopes.

They are standing in the driveway, waiting. The laughter bubbles up before the car slows to a stop, and I fumble in the dark for the door handle. “What took you so long?” Her mother is wearing a robe I don’t remember, and Anna is doing an Irish jig while she settles the tab with the driver. We flutter around the driveway, lighting first on each other, then on each of the children in turn. “My God, who is this big grown man?” Shaking my oldest son gently by the shoulders, arms reach for my littlest. “Mason, get over here and give babcia a hug. I’m gonna squeeze him!” Mason, wide eyed, is willingly enfolded in the embrace of his Godmother and her mother. I laugh, without hiding the tears sliding down my cheeks. “Ava, you look just like your mother. Are you hungry? Get inside, now, you’re gonna get eaten alive by mosquitos! Don’t forget to take your shoes off. Anna, did you make those beds?”

“Yes, Janice. I made the beds.” Eyes rolled in my direction make me laugh, and Anna makes a face at her mother. “Don’t pinch me. Who do you think you are? My mother?” We tumble down the stairs as quietly as we can manage, our small herd. But before I head downstairs to sleep, I pause. The kitchen is the same. There is the gleaming wooden table with the fluted white bowl in the center, where my parents ate pierogi and sauerkraut. The green wicker chair in the corner, which overlooks the garden. 

Every detail of the house rises up to meet me. Cut roses on the windowsill above the kitchen sink. The antique crystal glass, holding a dozen silver spoons next to the coffee pot and a plum kuchen, which will be our breakfast. The smell; clean and warm, like baking bread and lemon oil. The piano where Anna sang and practiced for hours, the painting of an old piece of pottery, cracked along its edge. That has been reframed. 

Standing alone, briefly, I hear words to a melody I was sure I’d lost. Like finding a key, hidden deep inside a pocket, one you thought you’d misplaced, I am flooded with relief. I am home, the world is ordered properly. I head slowly down the stairs to join my children and laugh for a few minutes with my friend before we all turn in, knowing full well that tonight, I will rest.