Pale skin. Grey eyes. Long hair knotting in the wind. Gazing out over the ocean, wistful and longing. This is how I imagined my 11-year old self, elbows resting on the railing, overlooking the private courtyards of downtown Padua. Kit Tyler knew how I felt. What it was like to leave everyone you loved. What it was like to move far away. What it was like to not fit in.

I spent hours on our apartment balcony, slowly working through the injustices of my Dad’s sabbatical. My Mom’s insistence I go to an Italian-only speaking school. The simultaneous romance of the adventure and isolation of being functionally silenced.

I’d brought six books; all required reading to advance to 7th Grade when I got back to Ohio. Our little trio must have read each one a dozen times. The burnt orange cover of Elizabeth George Speare’s The Witch of Blackbird Pond marked our attention in fuzzy cream lines, the paperboard cracking through the film.

Although I didn’t want to give my Mom the satisfaction, at school I learned Italian and made friends. Julia and I would walk arm-in-arm for la patatine fritte after class. Sing duets to Paula Abdul. My “boyfriend” Luca looked just like Macaulay Culkin with gold wire-rimmed glasses.

As hard as it was integrating into Italian life - switching sneakers for monk shoes, learning to laugh off the ever-hopeful “Ciao Bella!” - I ended up needing Kit more once I got home. Childhood friends had moved on. New romances and alliances had formed. I had grown, too.

I cried when I returned to Padua a decade later. The city was grittier than I remembered. From the street, our balcony looked smaller, cruddier. Not the windswept cliff I’d envisioned myself standing on so many silent afternoons, hoping a ship and the Captain’s son would save me too.

In the years between, I’d moved six times. Always going, then returning. Five countries. Each time casting new friends, then leaving again for an increasingly foreign home. What would Kit do? Create home in people. Look for the outliers. Belong with the people who don’t belong.

Last week, a friend died from Covid. As I told my husband of his shyness, his kindness, I felt heat wave up my spine. A warmth of homecoming. All these years, I’d wished to fit in. To be part of a community. Now here, unnoticed, in the margins of my greater acts, I’d gathered a heart family, connected to each other by both circumstance and choice. Kit’s final realization became my own: “It was not escape that she had dreamed about, it was love”.

“The 100 Dresses” was the first book that changed me. It was about an impoverished little girl who is teased by her classmates for wearing the same dress every day, and who defends herself by saying, ”I have one hundred dresses lined up in my closet!” When she is forced to move, again, out of poverty, they find one hundred beautiful drawings of dresses lined up in her closet. I cried myself to sleep worrying about poor people and brave little girls, wondering if my imagination might help save me, too.

Discovering my neighbors had the complete set of Nancy Drew books, I was able to “check out” seven or eight books at a time, lasting only a day or two, if I played “horsey,” with their plastic-horse-obsessed daughters, who made me “neigh” and ride them all over their yard. I enjoyed a more sophisticated Barbie doll existence, with great conversation and outfit changes, so I really earned those books. When I stepped into the world of Nancy, George, Ned and even (now UN-PC) “pleasantly plump” Bess, I didn’t hear my parents fighting, and could at least change something somewhere.

When I ran out of Nancy Drew, I found another girl detective series at the grocery store. There weren’t many in the set, but Trixie Beldon was a normal girl who helped her family with their farm, not rich like Nancy with all the time in the world. I realized I was middle class, like Trixie, and that I could still right wrongs in my spare time. Her best friend, Honey, was rich but didn’t know much about real life, and Trixie helped her with that. It was okay that my home life was hard. It made me a better person.

Marion Zimmer Bradley taught me feminism through Arthurian legends, Elena Ferrante validated the intesity of my female relationships, Toni Morrison taught me about lifelong grief, Jeannette Walls and Curtis Sittenfeld mirrored my life, and Colson Whitehead almost convinced me there was a literal Underground Railroad. David Sedaris’ writing has helped me many times, especially when my first cat, Rodney, was dying and needed to be put down. I was laughing and crying as I made the most adult decision of my life.

I have suffered from debilitating depression for too great a portion of my life, and when I’ve most wanted to die, I’ve picked up a book about someone else’s life and been spirited out of my own. Understanding someone else as a way to free us from ourselves. Less escapism than necessity, reading has also freed me from the curiousities of my yet-to-be understood brain.

I have almost nightly stepped into the shoes of people all over the world, experiencing their hopes and hardships, candor and cruelty, hoping to further my understanding of humanity. I believe history classes would be more effective if told through personal stories instead of textbooks. I find it harder to forget suffering and injustice when I know someone through a book.

There are many worlds with many possibilities and history rhymes with the present. I know this because I read it. Repeatedly. Through depression and traumas and financial insecurities, I turned page after page and learned the Wicked Witch is really Elphaba, radical liberationist and scapegoat of the autocratic regime of Oz.

While adjusting to life with a traumatic brain injury, books and stories, often in audio form, helped me create images in my mind again. I learned from the characters in an obscure Stephen King novel, Duma Key, that new doors open when others have been slammed shut.

In 2014 I read Ken Follett’s Century Trilogy. History became now. Recognizable names and famous speeches and events of WWI and then WWII interwoven into stories of fictitious families given so much dimension as to seem real. I wondered what it was like to be there. Going through life. With your desires and fears and plans. When a regime changes and sweeps you into a tide of coming atrocities previously unimaginable.

I wondered what it would be like to live inside a Ken Follett book in 2014, and by 2016 I felt like I knew the answer. But not the last chapter. So I read Hannah Arendt but the truth had already become stranger than fiction so non-fiction was no longer even up for consideration. Maybe Sinclair Lewis had the answer. Or Philip Roth, whose Plot Against America told me clearly what to expect.

But who would listen?

In 2016 I saw Randall Flagg gather up the Harold Lauders of the nation and claim victory. And in 2020, the Plague arrived. Camus taught me years before how a Plague can change people and creep into their minds. The foreknowledge did little to offset this effect. A good story, nonetheless.

Each story a search for answers. A fanciful escape for the faithful, a warning of what could be to the slightly high-strung realist. A lost opportunity for those who lack imagination, who won’t see themselves in the pages, who close the book and say “I never saw January 6th coming.”

I learned how to be a parent from reading A Tree Grows In Brooklyn, by Betty Smith.

The novel prepared me to expect the unexpected.

As a parent, you do not know what day your child will come to you and tell you of an incident that will drive you to violent thoughts that you pray do not become actions.

You don’t know if it will happen when they are young, when they are a teenager, or even when they become an adult themselves.

When your child tells you that something happened to them, your thoughts can go to a crazy extreme. For a moment, when you let your mind go still, you recall how Francie’s parents handled a menace lurking around their neighborhood. They were fearful, but they were honest with their children about it. They told their children what the danger was and then they showed up to protect their kids when the danger arrived. When Francie reveals to her parents that she can still feel where her attacker touched her leg, they don’t tell her “Don’t worry about it. It’s all in your head. Just ignore it, it will go away.” Instead, her dad takes action. He pours acid on a cloth and applies it to her skin.

A scar is formed and, for Francie, it eliminates the visceral feeling of unwanted male flesh touching her. Instead of ignoring his daughter and let her ruminate about the incident in her head for years to come every time she looked at her leg, her dad creates a new memory. A memory of strength, not of fear.

As a parent, you sometimes have the ability to overpower the emotional pain that has been inflicted upon your child and add to it a memory of you helping her. Acid is not required. You can use words to help your children find a way forward. The emotional scar that remains can remind them of the help, not the hurt.

I am a better parent from reading and rereading this book, picking up the book at times in my early adult life when I didn’t want to be a parent yet. I realize now I was absorbing the words and holding them in a safe place, the lessons revealing themselves to me when necessary. Francie did not have the best parents in the world, but when they tried, they were the best parents they could be. And that’s the grace I give myself in the hard moments.

My mother loved to read aloud, and we always read a chapter of a book before my bedtime. My favorite books were Winnie the Pooh and Mary Poppins, followed by Wind In the Willows and Alice In Wonderland. We read the same books so often that I learned to read by following along. I had them memorized but loved having them read to me. I equated reading with love. I still do.

The characters were my best friends and were always available to me. As an only child who frequently moved due to my father’s job, this was important since other children were not still in supply. Books, in contrast, were.

We spent one summer living with my grandmother while my grandfather was seriously ill.

I was not allowed to play with the other children in the neighborhood, and all of the adults’ focus was on my grandfather’s health issues. Books saved me. By that time, I was reading Nancy Drew and solving mysteries.

Both sets of grandparents had homes crammed with books. I was never at a loss for something to do, and once I started reading, I left the real world and traveled to other times and places. I could happily entertain myself for a day. At night, I read under the covers.

By the time I was ten, I was dropped off at the library while my mother shopped. I quickly exhausted the blue biography books Childhoods of Famous Americans and other age-appropriate books. With my parents’ and the librarians’ permission, I read the books in the adult section. I discovered plays and read all of the Best Plays Theatre Yearbooks.

The smell of books was dizzying. Bibliosmia! I was disappointed to learn that that distinctive smell was actually from the chemical breakdown of compounds in the paper. No matter. For me, the scent will forever promise adventure.

Literacy has always been a wonderful gift, and I am proud to be on the board of directors for two libraries and a literary center.

(336 words)

I was drowning and I didn’t mind. Maybe I was ten, maybe I was twelve, but Where the Red Fern Grows had me by the neck and held me under its well of words. I read the book, then I read it again, each time drowning in letters on the page and tears by the time I reached the last of it. I named the first dog, a beagle, I ever bought for myself, Ol’ Dan. He snorted, was fat, he never hunted, but daily he reminded me of that book.

When younger than that, I lived in a neighborhood that had an ice cream truck and a bookmobile. The ice cream truck meandered our streets daily in the summer; it’s bell, heard blocks away, made my sister and me scramble for change, search under couch pillows, and beg our parents for treats. The bookmobile didn’t visit as often, maybe once a week or two, and although my sister was less enthusiastic, I raced around in the same fashion, gathering borrowed books to return so I could pick new ones.

The outside of the van had imaginary landscapes, Seussian characters, Puff the Magic Dragon, and flying carpets emblazoned on its sides. Inside was a dimly lit heaven. Shelves and shelves of bungeed books, a carpet with flattened roads and flattened buildings, green stars meant to be trees, and a small table, two chairs. My mother sat folded in a chair patiently, while my sister and I looked and looked until I finally picked two new books. I wanted to be a bookmobile driver when I grew up so I could borrow books anytime I wanted.

There was the town library, too. My first official signature in script was scrawled across the bottom of my first library card. That card opened worlds for me. In the books I borrowed, I saw myself, I saw the selves I could be, I saw the selves I would never be, but was glad to meet. I shook hands with each hero and each villain alike, taking what I could from them, borrowing (or stealing) wherever I wanted. I was a thief of words.

They danced in my head everywhere I went, and when I didn’t have a book, those words made for playmates that I could spend time with when my friends weren’t available. With them I created my own stories, my own worlds. Those words kept me up at night, visited me in my dreams, made dramatic appearances in my backyard and played house in my room. As a child, I spent much of my time swimming out in the ocean depths of words inside me, floating, drowning, and I didn’t mind.

My parents created a slot canyon lined with blankets in the backseat where, tented by picture books, I camped for the nine-hour drive. Dick, Jane, Sally couldn't leave school grounds, but Sam I Am, Little Bear, and Miss Suzy the squirrel -- the entirety of my personal library -- accompanied me.

Previously, the few times my family had driven upstate, we left New York City after rush hour. Sunset burned outside the windshield. Above the illuminated highway stripes, black undulating humps rose lightless, lifeless.

"Mountains," my father said.

Monsters I heard and cowered.

This trip, we'd rise with the sun, drive all day, and get to Niagara Falls by dinnertime. None of us knew it back then, but we would move cross-state a total of five times in my first six years of school: west, east, south, north, center. Me the new kid, again and again and again.

By the second move I grasped that classmates couldn't be counted on. I formed reliable relationships with books, idolizing heroines who worked their way out of scrapes. The orphan who seeded her imagination across the fields and forests of Prince Edward Island. The freckled girl whose composition notebooks filled with peer reviews made her an outcast. The bored little sister whose route to adventure has since become an internet cliche.

If I moved between September and June, I'd look for my storyfriends during library period. In summer, my father would walk me to the town library where I'd sign my name to my own card.

The reunion always began with Anne. I'd search the stacks, M for Montgomery, hoping not just for Green Gables and Avonlea but all six Anne books. Then F for Fitzhugh, Harriet the Spy, maybe even The Long Secret and Sport. The last a classic, C for Carroll, Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass.

By the third move I earned adult borrowing privileges. That summer I took The Andromeda Strain on vacation.

"Who's carrying who?" an adult called out, seeing the thick pages propped against my bony knees. "The kid or the book?"

My father joined Book-of-the-Month Club and passed along The Martian Chronicles. I liked S is for Space, but Dandelion Wine shook the welcome mat of small town life. Clinton, NY felt too close to Green Town, Illinois.

Childhood warned me: Don't look back.

I stay present physically but risk time travel through literature, rereading the same 1983 Bantam paperback every two years.

Little, Big by John Crowley is set in a folly house -- a home with multiple facades of varying architectural styles -- where generations of Drinkwaters and Barnables truck with fairies and discover "the further in you go, the bigger it gets." Formerly a rootless child, protagonist Smoky Barnable marries into a house that's both prison and portal.

Similarly, in the slot canyon covid has scoured, I've returned to blankets and books. Hunkered down I'm liberated, joyous inside my head, my imagination the only home I've never, ever left.

This line never fails to resonate with me: "My eyes were still closed. I was in my house. I knew that. But I didn’t feel like I was inside anything." But this year, in quarantine, that line devastated me as I read it aloud to my students, in that way we feel when we're laughing and crying at the same time, despair and hope mixed with exhaustion. I longed to identify with its hope, but couldn't shake the ambiguity that follows. Will the narrator wake a changed man or simply hungover? Then I realized that perhaps it doesn't matter.

Near the climax of Raymond Carver's short story "Cathedral," a blind man, Robert, and our unnamed narrator get stoned to a TV documentary on cathedrals. Robert gently inquires about his host's spirituality, prompting the narrator's reply that he doesn't believe "in anything."

A man of petty grievances and prejudices, the narrator is a slave to his ego. He attempts to assuage his suffering with scotch, pot, and TV. He is disconnected from the world and himself. But over the course of the evening, the two break bread, get sloshed, draw a cathedral, and the narrator experiences a moment of transcendence.

I relate to the narrator's ennui and predilection for escapism as much as I strive to emulate Robert's empathy and patience. Carver uses the surface polarity of the two men to hint at that universal tension beneath the surface that keeps so many of us up at night; we all suffer, we all fall prey to our egos, and yet there is always the possibility of a moment when we can transcend these seemingly insurmountable obstacles. It's that possibility that keeps me reading, teaching, and breathing.

As they're drawing the cathedral together, hand upon hand, our narrator begins to let his guard down and allow the experience of the moment to consume him. Robert remarks, "Never thought anything like this could happen in your lifetime, did you, bub? Well, it’s a strange life, we all know that."

Carver's sublime understatement captures that fleeting quality that makes life meaningful even in our most despondent times, the ability to connect with another human, with an idea, with something greater than ourselves. As a teacher and student, I appreciate both characters' perspectives here. Akin to the narrator, I've had moments when someone I'd misjudged surprised me in previously unimaginable ways, expanding my perspective on the world in the process. Like Robert, I've realized experiential learning can soften the most resolute of barriers, that the Socratic method opens minds more than didacticism any day.

Robert and the narrator, two disparate creatures, create something beautiful together, and the narrator's moment of epiphany evinces my worldview: the acts of creation and interpretation are everything, and neither are truly solitary experiences. These two strange bedfellows, blind man and bigot, one hand upon the other, like writer and reader, create a new incarnation of something timeless, something meaningful, even if it is but a fleeting moment.