Old Friends

Today I sat for the better part of the morning, out of this grey cold drizzle of a day, tucked into the warm corner seat of a secondhand bookshop reading poetry... Ezra Pound, precise and perfect. Marge Piercy. Robert Frost. Donald Hall.

I basked in the sheer indulgence of this stolen time, undisturbed. No children. No work interruptions. Not even a nosy sales clerk asking me if I needed assistance. Which I most definitely did not.

After awhile, my eyes moved from my little pile of poetry books to the shelves to my left. "Children's Classics" had been handwritten on a piece of paper, and taped above the shelf. I was entranced. I could've spent all day there on Treasure Island or with the Swiss Family Robinson.

A few weeks ago I started making a list of the books I grew up with. I'm not sure why. I felt somehow I'd like to record this. For whom I don't know. My children, perhaps. Certainly I would love to impart to my children the same love of reading that I had as a child. I would spend hours at a time, every day, with my nose in a book.

My list looks something like this:

The Nancy Drew series
The Trixie Belden series
The Story of George Washington Carver
A Wrinkle in Time
Pollyanna
The Bobbsey Twins
Swiss Family Robinson
Little House in the Big Woods
Little Women
Black Beauty
Treasure Island
Island of the Blue Dolphins
My Side of the Mountain
Heidi
A Child's Garden of Verses
The Little Prince
The Adventures of Pippi Longstocking
The Witch of Blackbird Pond
The Call of the Wild
To Build a Fire
Are You There, God? It's Me, Margaret.
Go Ask Alice

I would read the same books over and over again. There was such a sense of familiarity in knowing the plot and the characters. The words were like old friends that welcomed me into their lives over and over again. I felt safe in those books, happy, secure. They were a welcome escape from a less than ideal childhood.

When I finally ventured back out into the rain, my heart was lifted because I carried with me under my arm a few old friends.