stepped in. Reading has made my least favorite season not only one I can now tolerate but one I have begun to look forward to. By actively hating summer for years, I unintentionally built my own protective structure from the elements of sun, sand and fun.
Every summer, a very dear friend has her birthday party on the beach. Her e-mail message to me always says "I know you won't come but" before giving me the location and date. Another close friend has given up trying to lure me into climbing a mountain in 100-degree heat.
I think she is insane for doing this, and she thinks I'm "all about coffee and museums." How I've ended up with such well-adjusted friends is obvious the ones like me are inside their houses or under shady trees or finding the coolest, darkest place for three months to read books and shield their faces. I grew up in a house of readers, but I was actually not one of them.
My father, a professor of Romance languages, sat about the house with small, precious volumes from overseas. They were bound in leather and had ribbons sewn into their bindings that our jealous bassets would reach out to paw. My mother read poetry and mysteries.
Anne Sexton and Agatha Christie were stacked on her bedside table. And my sister read Ray Bradbury and the Bible and in high school went on a C.S.
She sat on a spring-shot sofa in her bedroom that had once been downstairs in the living room and pored over textbooks for the coming school year. An undiagnosed case of dyslexia defined me as the nonreader of the family. Stupid was how I felt.
In summer I built Barbie a highway out of cardboard and construction paper and ran her over and over again with my Hot Wheels and Matchboxes in a home-grown version of Attack of the 50-Foot Woman I made a secretive, sweaty universe of the space beneath my ancient rope bed, only to find the dust ruffles, my stage curtains, parted by the snout of an equally bored and lonely basset. Now, in a way that seemed impossible when I was a child, I read maniacally. And I read everything my family did: poetry, mysteries, ancient leather books with ribbons swinging with two cats, not bassets, pawing them and old textbooks from the 1800s.
If the phone rings between June and September, I am often jolted out of my make-believe world. I am with Henry James' Isabel Archer or the ever more poignant Strether, returning over and over again to the cruel fates they can do nothing to change. I'm with Celia and Dorothea, trying on their mother's jewels and feeling, each time I return to Eliot's amazing , more and more pity for Mr.
Casaubon, whom I initially took to be nothing but a mean and bitter prig. This is summer, a time to read, which for me is play. It is also comfort, company, a way to buffer oneself from the pain and isolation of the everyday.
It is the peace I find by visiting my closest friends. I have given up thinking I'm deranged for discovering them between the covers of a book. To me, it is simple.
There is our world the world of mundane annoyances, of heat and grit, and of hideous realities, and there is that other world I visit each summer. The world of fiction. Alice Sebold is the author of "The Lovely Bones" and the forthcoming novel "The Almost Noon.
" stepped in.
News RSS