I Thought Reading Was Preparing For Adulthood

Thank you, mom.

From the moment I learned to read up until when I went to boarding school at eleven, I read like a maniac, my mom was pleasantly shocked at this. I was a very stubborn kid because I didn’t like being a kid, I was always waiting for childhood to be over, not a classic troublemaker but I wasn’t easy at all. I rejected and objected, to everything, I still do but now I can vocalize why. It was as if I was waiting to read for the first six years of my life and the floodgate opened when I figured out how to. I blazed through all the classics at an early age, probably too early, I don’t remember a word of them. I thought reading was preparing for adulthood. She still talks about how unstoppable I was and she’d constantly buy me books, we’d go to the bookstore twice a week.

The bookstore owner was an old man my mom knew from when she was a student and bought her textbooks there, he was a friend of grandpa. As they kept chatting about this or that relative and who died when, I walked around his little store and picked books. I would now give a million dollars to know what my selection criteria was. I’d return with a stack of them and say “These.” She’d buy every single one of them, no questions asked, thank you, mom. I felt better when I finished a book but I also felt I had so much more to read so I couldn’t go at a sustainable pace. I knew the repertoire was endless and it would just get bigger and bigger the more I read. It didn’t matter if I didn’t like what I was reading, I kept on and to tell you the truth, I didn’t find some special cozy place in books till much later, they didn’t make my imagination run wild like they’re supposed to when you’re a kid, no magical place where the kid lays in bed bewildered by the things he’s reading, not at all. I read them with a straight face, simply registering what was going on and how. If anything, I was hoping they’d give me clues about the adult world. They gave me something to do, they gave me a job and by that, they gave me a reason to pretend I wasn’t a kid. By fourth grade, I was already blind as a bat. Then came middle school, my reading slowed down, I discovered girls.