My Name was Supposed to be Elizabeth Ann

In my earliest memory, I sit on my mother’s lap as she reads Mother Goose. Wait here, she says, sliding me onto the couch before standing. I’ll be right back. 

Sunset stripes the room with shadow monsters, the darkest one yawning in a corner. It swallows her whole. Feet, legs, body, crown. She is there and then she isn’t, which frightens me. But I am a good girl, so I wait like she told me. I press my nose to the pictures. I trace the squiggly black lines with one finger. My finger does not work like hers. Hers magicks squiggles into sounds, sounds into words. Mine merely smudges the page. 

Tick, tick, tick, the clock says, and still she does not appear. I bang my feet. I call her name. She promised to tell me a story, but she stopped in the middle and now I am not frightened but mad. How will I ever learn what happens?

I am 18 months old. 

Literature, quite frankly, saved my life.

Mine was not an extravagant childhood, but thanks to my mother I always had books. 

Library books, mainly, but acquiring them was an adventure, baby brother tucked in his coach, I grasping its frame and tromping Torresdale Avenue to a red brick kingdom. Climbing its steps was like climbing a mountain, but I was not a baby. I was three, and I could read. I could push its doors open (almost) by myself. Later, when I turned six and we left Philadelphia for Dauphin, the local library was housed 20 car minutes away in Colonial Park Mall, our trips sandwiched between stops at Pathmark or Hills, sometimes the doctor’s, the now five of us kids piled into our orange and brown station wagon. Time was money, and money was tight.

But sometimes, my mother found a little extra for book fair paperbacks. I would pour over Scholastic order forms, desperate to stretch my dollars, wishing my siblings would share their allotments. They didn’t read, not like I did. They bought tri-colored pens and boy band posters–quickly broken, quickly trashed–whereas I, I needed my books.   

Engrossed in their magic, at recess I curled on icy concrete sills to read, oblivious to cold, to kickballs and jump ropes slapping the rutted macadam.  I stayed up past bedtime reading, annoying my big sister. I tucked books in bathroom cabinets and claimed a stomach ache so I could read instead of doing my chores, annoying everyone. The worst punishment ever?  Taking away my reading privileges. My mother did that to me exactly one time in third grade, after she’d gifted me a subscription to Nancy Drew. I was a good kid, yes, but not perfect, and must have broken who knows what rule. I broke another when I sneaked my newly arrived book from her dresser before catching the school bus and reading behind opened textbooks until THE END on the return bus home.

The first–but certainly not the last–time I ever binged. 

The first–and definitely last–time I was ever without a book.

Teenage me read my mother’s magazines and romances, she read my Agatha Christie. Only twice did she censor my selections. The first time, when I was twelve and we evacuated during the TMI nuclear disaster. The second, when I was 33 and reading Harry Potter to my five-year-old son.

Nor did anyone else censor me. Not my teachers, not my librarians. Rather, they helped me find books. They made recommendations. They encouraged me to read not only beyond my grade, but beyond my experience and imagination. That’s how I discovered not just stories, but literature, and literature, quite frankly, saved my life.

Hyperbole? No.

Because mine was also not a safe childhood, but thanks to my books I always had an out. Books gave me answers, alternatives.

Hope.

While my father raged, I escaped into stories. I world-hopped and time-traveled. I dreamed and I planned. I learned to step outside of myself, outside of my geography. My era. Eventually, finally, I escaped in real life. I attended college, then grad school. I began a thirty-one-year career in education. I married and had two children.

And I kept reading. Essays and poetry. History, drama, fiction. Whereas high school AP had introduced me to the primarily Western canon, university and reader friends introduced me to everyone else. Everyone else taught me more than I could have ever learned on my own.

I learned I am unique, yet like so many others. I learned to celebrate that friction.

I learned even adults can be wrong. I learned how to check.

I learned how to think for myself and how to ask for help. I learned to distinguish their difference.

I learned that what you read isn’t nearly as important as how you read it– How you use it to create something new. Bold. Transformative. 

Beautiful.

Aside from love, there is no greater magic.

That philosophy grounded my teaching. 

That’s why my heart cracks every time I discover another book challenge, another book ban. Particularly by those who haven’t even read the book, who not only reject any challenge to their own worldview but who demand others conform to it. Like my mother’s pastor, who warned his congregation of Harry Potter’s evil. He had never even read one of its then-four books but based his judgment on scuttlebutt and lies, which my mother repeated to me as gospel even though she too had never read word one. (I’ll be chatting more about that in a future post.)

You see, I learned that ignorance is a yawning, gulping shadow like the one from my infancy, swallowing not only the individual but those in its path. I didn’t know that then, of course. Then, I knew only that I needed to hear the whole story, which meant I needed to yell at the shadow, demand it return my mother, and demand she finish what she started.

So I did. 

*****

Memory, of course, can be unreliable. 

However, years later when I recalled that story, my mother confirmed its accuracy. The room I described was our apartment’s living room. The dark corner, the basement doorway. She’d been gone mere minutes, switching a load of clothes from the washer, and hurried upstairs when I tottered too close to the rickety steps. She scolded me, then drew me back to the couch to finish reading. Neither of us remembered which story rhyme, but we agreed I couldn’t have been any older than eighteen months, as we moved farther up the avenue shortly thereafter, to a rowhome whose upper windows framed the Tacony-Palmyra drawbridge. I was terrified of that bridge. That bridge gobbled trucks and spat smoke-belching ships. I scrunched my eyes shut whenever I was forced to cross it.

Nearly twenty years later–newly married, newly employed–I returned to the city of my birth and drove that bridge almost twice daily, for 31 school years.

And nearly 54 years later, I still have my Mother Goose. I read it to my own babies, but they didn’t enjoy it as much as I had. He preferred Alfie. She, Madeline. Eventually, I packed Mother Goose into a box, the box into the basement. As I wrote this, I tried and failed to find her. Instead, I found five more Nancy Drews, Milton’s Paradise Lost, and an Emily Dickinson collection, all of which I carried upstairs to my library to be shelved. My husband shook his head and told me I should stop buying books, I have no more room.

I told him, I will always have room. 

And I will always keep looking for Mother Goose.

I’ve saved her a space right there, next to Nancy.

*****

I usually post the first Saturday of each month.

NEXT UP,

November 4th: CEMETERIES, SECOND CHANCES, AND MY FIRST EVER VISIT TO SALEM 

December 2nd: TEN BOOKS THAT CHANGED ME FOREVER

And coming up in 2024: HARRY POTTER AND THE CULTURE OF ERASURE, plus conversations with reader friends about the books they cannot live without.

Thanks for reading 🙂