A pause for the cause....

I’ve had a “bug” for a couple of days.  Thankfully it doesn’t happen often, and once is a great while is quite enough.   I’m a horrible patient….a patient without patience.  There are things I want to do, and when throwing up doesn’t allow me to get to those things I tend to get testy.

My bouts with the flu are always the same.  I am in total denial (I am NOT going to be sick)  until a growing nausea  inspires me (don't make me throw up!) to tear through cabinets in search of some magic potion that will stop my stomach from erupting like Old Faithful.  I know I can stop this (don't make me throw up!) if I find just the right medicine or if I can strike the right bargain with God. (please don't make me throw up!)  Next thing I know my exortations are silenced by a geyser of Alka Seltzer and anything else that I've ingested within the last 12 hours.   Ugh, it's official....I'm sick.   I would make a terrible bulimic. 

If there’s anything at all that’s good about a sick day it has to be the enforced bed rest that allows one to catch up on some reading.   It might be a novel I’ve been working on for a while, might be a stack of catalogs I’ve been saving for a quiet moment, even magazines still wrapped in plastic.   Actually it ended up being all three, and I spent Thursday evening and all day Friday cuddled in bed with a stack of reading material.

Halfway through the stack of unopened magazines I paused for a minute to reflect on how much I enjoy reading and then, as it always happens, the woman who presented me with this gift crossed my mind.

I can’t remember if it was second or third grade, but I remember the teacher well who inspired my love of reading.  Her name was Hilda Bowman, and I was in school at Mifflin Elementary.  I thought she was an “older” woman, but looking back at pictures I’ve saved from grade school there she is, smiling out from the 1950’s in that old school picture, hair tightly curled and wearing a dark flowered dress with a white collar.   Although it’s a head and shoulders shot I know it was a dark flowered “dress” because in those days teachers dressed like ladies, these were the days before pant suits or slacks. I bet she was somewhere between thirty and thirty five at the most.

I think she must have been a relatively new teacher, but I remember sitting at her feet as she read to the class.   She was animated and enthusiastic…and I remember wanting to have the power that she had.   At the time I thought her “power” was the ability to read, but much later I realized what I really wanted was the power to communicate.   Reading was a very important part, but it was her power to communicate what she read to us that fascinated me.    Her reading to us and telling us stories made me impatient to be able to read and learn things for myself.  I wish I had been old enough to understand that and tell her how I appreciate the unquenchable curiosity she woke in me.

I spent my youth lost in one book or another….trying on personalities and visiting foreign places, seeing things I never would have imagined.  Growing up with one black and white TV in the house it wasn’t hard to tear yourself away from the “boob tube” to do something else.   But today, with hundreds of channels from which to choose, it’s just as easy.   There are so few television shows on that I think are interesting.  The fascination behind “reality TV” completely escapes me, and movies no longer have endings that make any sense to me.   In truth I don’t recognize many of the faces in either; that seems to be an age thing. 

And so I constantly turn to my dearest friend, reading.    A stack of well-chosen books is as welcoming to me as a group of friends with whom I have a great deal in common.   On the other hand a book that challenges my thinking and makes me take a closer look at my own beliefs is something I enjoy as well.

I can’t think of anything anyone ever gave me that has lasted longer and meant so much to me as my love of reading.   Thank you, Hilda Bowman.   I don’t know if you’re still out there, but if I had the chance to meet you again, perhaps over a cup of coffee, after all these years I would say, “Thank you. Your dedication to your craft has given me a lifelong passion for reading and communication.  What you chose to do with your life made a great difference in my own.” 

“Fiction allows us to slide into these other heads, these other places, and look out through other eyes.  And then in the tale we stop before we die, or we die vicariously and unharmed, and in the world beyond the tale we turn the page or close the book and we resume our lives.”  Neil Gaiman, American Gods

                                       LIFE IS GOOD