Stories Are the Blood of My Heart

R.N. McManus

Some of my earliest memories include the stories I read that thrilled me; many of which continued as companions into adulthood. The old memories don’t include the actual process of learning to read at a young age; my mother has told that story often enough to be a manufactured memory, as family stories can easily become.

My mom was a high school dropout, completing only tenth grade so that she could marry my dad in 1950: from his high school pictures I know that he was very popular with that blonde pompadour piled on top of his head and a Pepsodent smile to go with it. Quite the catch, he seemed. Of course, marriage meant that both of my parents went full-time into the workforce.

I wouldn’t make the scene until a cold February night in 1954. Stopping her education to have a married life, meant that she always put a lot of stock in reading and education. She was an avid reader herself, and she wanted any child of hers to go on to college and become a professional -- to make something of themselves.

Mom taught me to read using the newspaper comics, especially the Sunday comics, and the Little Golden Books series. Yes, we had the Sambo book and the Uncle Remus books. The racism so casually expressed in those and other books flew over children’s heads, but it soaked into the subconscious and became problematic as the world changed around us. More on the wins and losses of desegregation in another post.

My Mom’s diligence produced a pretty good reader by the first day of public schooling in the first grade. As my mother tells it, my teacher wanted to know which kindergarten I had attended.

“He didn’t go to kindergarten, I taught him at home,” my mother replied.

“Well honey, you did a wonderful job. He finishes all of his assignments quicker than the others and sits there bored!” the teacher, Mrs. Blackmon suggested, “Maybe we should consider placing him a grade higher now”

Mother wisely refused that offer, intuiting I would be better off staying in my age cohort. So, it was off to the races for education, classmates, and that wonderful school library. I don’t recall, but the presence of so many books -- and it was a small elementary school -- must have thrilled me out of my shoes!

When I found out that even during the summer, the school library was open in the mornings I would walk the mile to the school to check out as many books as I could carry. They had a series of biographies, all published by the same company. Each had distinctive, colorful covers; they told about Americans who’d impacted our history, both military and civilian. That was my introduction to Davy Crockett, Daniel Boone, Francis Marion and many more; Clara Barton and Florence Nightingale both impressed me; probably more than I know, because my second career was nursing.

My favorite time in school, aside from recess, was library time. Classwork was dull unto death, Dick and Jane and Tag, their dog; who cares? Math was easy enough and remained mildly interesting, but library time meant I could mentally go where I wanted, leave that classroom and the whole school behind.

My next phase in the reading adventure was to discover the public library. Whoo! Bookshelves higher than I could reach and a whole building full of them! My new favorite obsession was in fact a small, red-brick building, but it might as well have been a portal to any place in the universe.

This is the time when my reading habits solidified and thrilling adventure was the order of the day every day. Fortunately, the librarians didn’t police what I check out. The lack of their perspicacity meant that I could read “above my weight”. The habit was found to be good and persists. Stories not meant for children found their way into my stack of books to check- out, and I devoured anything about World War II, especially spying and flying. The classic adventures of knights, musketeers, space heroes, cowboys and gunslingers, mountaineers and sea-faring tales; these were my Walter Mitty moments; I would make his acquaintance a few years later in high school lit class.

Reading fiction today, I am still more taken with a good story well told than any of the fey tricks authors pull sometimes. I’ve just read that an author is publishing a book composed of one long sentence - no thank you; unless it tells a helluva story.