The Reader

Mother never, ever, tried to change me.  She tried to help me be the best that I could be, she tried to teach me (little boy me, teenage me, adult me) to live in the light with dignity and grace.  She tried to make me understand that all of the emotions I felt were better kept under control, she tried to help me learn to understand my temper, she tried to help me make friends with my depression, she tried to help me become the best person that I could be.  Other than that, My Mam left me to become who she saw I was going to be, all on my own, under my own aegis and her watchful, protective eye.  My artistic nature never came into question with Mama… well… maybe once, when she refused to buy eight-year-old Stephen the cast album to Gypsy, starring Angela Lansbury, because it was a play about strippers, but that was a very rare occasion.  Mommy always spoke to me like her little boy, while talking to me like an adult - it was a mind-blowing balancing act that she seemed to master without complication.

Juana treated me like the person that she knew I was.

I had seen the movie Mary Poppins at an early age.  I had stumbled upon the cast album for My Fair Lady when I was about eight years old.  The public library was my personal sanctuary, I would spend hours there, digging through the cases and shelves to see what I could find to nourish my artistic soul and ease the pain of being bullied at school.  When I was at the library, nothing outside mattered.  Looking back, I am trying to remember where the grown-ups were during these lengthy trips to the library.  I know I was allowed to roam through the entire library unattended, pulling down books of any nature, either to take home or to look at on the premises.  I know that my stays there were not brief.  But I also know that I never saw a parent until one of them came and said it was time to go home.  Until that time came, though, I could be found sprawled out on the generic brown community building carpet, surrounded by books like the Random House play scripts of My Fair Lady and Funny Girl, the children’s books Freaky Friday, Half-Magic, and The Borrowers, picture books about show business like A Pictorial History of the Talkies, and biographies like The Story of the Trapp Family Singers and Julie Andrews: A Biography by Robert Windeler.  This was my happy place and the place where I built the foundation of knowledge that would inform the rest of my life.

There came a day, sometime in 1973, maybe ‘74, when I was at home with Mama.  My sister was at some after-school thing, my little brother was playing in his room, and the baby was doing whatever it is that babies do.  If I was engaged in one of my regular pastimes, I was either flung over the back of the sofa, feet in the air, leaning on the floor with my elbows, reading a book, watching the enormous console television set, or coloring.  Maybe I was daydreaming, for that was a major and important occupation for me.  These were my pre-teen pastimes (also my teenage and adult pastimes).   The telephone rang and Mommy answered it, and I was there to overhear the conversation, a conversation she and I would discuss later, leaving it, forever, burned in my memory.

“Mrs. Mosher, this is the principal of Stephen’s school.  His homeroom teacher has been in to see me because she is, we are, concerned with the literature that he is reading in his spare time at school, and we wanted to talk to you about it.”

“Why, what is he reading?” asked Me Mother, seeking information about the offending literature that I was taking to school in my bookbag.

“Stephen was found reading James Michener’s Hawaii,” informed the elementary school official.

“So?”  (My Mother had a wonderful economy with words.)

“Don’t you think that’s a little advanced for a nine-year-old boy?” 

“I don’t.  And if this is the most troubling thing that you have to deal with at school, I think you’re lucky.   Please feel free to call me again if Stephen actually gets into any kind of real trouble, but he is allowed to read whatever he wants.”

At the time, I was a Fifth Grader in a basic school system in Ohio, and it would only be another two years, when I was a Seventh Grader in a small International School in Portugal, that Mama would get a similar call from another school official.  The conversation was mostly the same, only more abbreviated.

“Mrs. Mosher, this is the headmaster at St. Columban’s - I’d like to express my disapproval over the book that Stephen’s teacher found him reading on the playground during recess.”

“What seems to be the problem?”

“Are you aware that Stephen is reading the book The Other Side of Midnight by Sidney Sheldon?”

“Yes, he got that from me.”

“Are you aware of the nature of the book?”

“Yes, he saw me reading it and asked if he could borrow it when I was finished.”

Sidney Sheldon was Me Mother’s favorite author.  Naturally, wanting to be just like Mama, I wanted to read his books, too.  After reading The Other Side Of Midnight at the age of twelve, my entire life was spent haunting bookstores to see if the new Sidney Sheldon novel had come out.  I made it into a game with myself, going into my favorite bookstores, looking at every section, strolling each department, until I finished my trip to the shops by stepping into the NEW RELEASES section, where I would look at the shelves from A to Z, so that when I got the S’s I might be surprised by the cover-out display of a new Sidney Sheldon novel.  I never waited for them to go on sale, I bought the new hardcover tome then and there and took my treasure home.  I even made the deliberate choice to not read four of them because I knew that, one day, Sidney Sheldon would die and I would never again have the excitement of reading a new Sidney Sheldon novel.  That was a gift that my Mother gave me, one that I have never forgotten.  She knew that I was precocious.  She knew that I was advanced.  She knew that there was no point in trying to stop me from growing up at the rate that I, myself, had determined.  She knew the benefit of reading and of expanding my mind, whatever the literature of my choice.

Juana saw me.  She always saw me.  In doing this, she taught me the importance of seeing others.