Books are treasure troves of information and fountains of knowledge.  I have loved and cherished them all my life.  When I was tiny my Grammy would give me a Sears Catalog, which I would pore over for hours.  It irked my parents when she gave me a summer catalog insert of my very own.  How many hours they spent surreptitiously trying to grab my little treasure and assign it to the fire.

No matter how many were fed to the flames in an old pot-belly stove, Grammy always had a fresh one for me. Finally they stopped burning my inserts and let me have my precious books.  In our house there was not one book.  We didn’t even have the ubiquitous Bible.  Neither parent read the newspaper.  My father had to quit school in third grade to work to help feed the family of nine.

So how, then, did I come to read at two and come to cherish the written word…  Only my mother could read and she had no interest in me whatsoever.  Except for the one time when she had taken me with her to the doctor and I found a bound book of planes and blimps.  The doctor had picked me up and pointed to the blimp and said, “This is a plane.”  Indignant,  I piped up, “That’s not a plane, that’s a blimp…”  It delighted the doctor and my mother was a medical groupie, loving to get medical attention.  I guess she thought my “cuteness” might help her in her quest for more imagined illness.

No one read to me, except my Grammy on the rare occasions when I spent time with her.  She would let me pore over her books and would tell what a word meant.  In her  little aprons with pockets to store erasers and pieces of peppermint candy, my Granny was the love of my life. She barely stood 4‘8“, with perm-frizzled gray hair and a melt-your-heart smile.

Things had never been stable in our household.  I didn’t understand then, but now I know my mother was a disturbed person and unhappy with my stoic, silent father.  Back then I was told that I would be staying with Grammy in the summer.  I could barely contain my emotions, but knew too much enthusiasm might change my mother’s mind.  Everyone doted on Richard, my brother.  Men were the important part of society and he was treated like a prince.