Growing up in our house, books reigned supreme.  My mother used to say the one thing she couldn’t stand to throw out, was a book.  Other women might have an old pair of jeans from high school, stuffed in the back of the closet hoping someday to fit back into them.  Momma had her favorite book, the cover tattered and held together with scotch tape, sitting on her night table.  To this day, she re-reads that book at least once a year.  It is Betty Smith’s, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.

It wasn’t unusual for books to worm their way into the very décor of our home.  A pile of old encyclopedias served as an end table.  The bookshelves, of course were stuffed with them, and there were bookshelves in every room of the house.  Momma once rescued an entire elementary school library from incineration.  She had read about the school being demolished to make way for a strip mall. 

Momma felt something was amiss in all this destruction and rode over to the site to see for herself just what was going on.  When she arrived and saw boxes and crates full of books being hauled out of the school, she took action.

“Whats in those boxes?” she asked one of the foreman.

“We have to empty the building before we can knock it down.  Those boxes are full of books from the library.”

“I see.  So the books going to another school then?”

“No Ma’am.  They’re old books and not worth much.  I believe they are actually to be burned.”

“BURNED?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

This, of course, was murder in Momma’s eyes.  Somehow she managed to convince that foreman to have his crew load the boxes into the back of her station wagon.  She had to make ten trips to get them all home, but she did it.  Momma saved an entire library that day.  That’s just who she was.

Later, those old library books would be my entrance into the world of reading.  The cover on one of those old books had nearly disintegrated and couldn’t be put back together again.  Undaunted, Momma used it to paper the bathroom under the stairs on the first floor.  It was a primary reader and I can remember crouching with her between the commode and the old pedestal sink, tracing the letters, my pudgy fingers guided by her elegant ones.  I learned to read on a bathroom wall.

Daddy, while not as much of a book lover as Momma, saw the value in our learning to read and humored the piles of books in every conceivable corner.  Daddy had his own world of escape.  It was a room on the back of our detached garage.  We called it, “The Plunder Room.”  Most everyone else would’ve called it a workshop.  I’m not sure why it was given that title, so strange. 

Daddy created there.  With bits of old orange crates and tin cans salvaged from dinner, he would make toys and sometimes wagons.  These creations appeared crude, but were actually elegant in that they were fitted together perfectly.  Many a neighborhood child had one of Daddy’s toys as part of a birthday present.  Their grandchildren still play with them today.

On Sunday mornings, the papers would arrive.  Momma shunned TV and didn’t watch the news, so she caught up on the week’s happenings by reading several different papers on Sunday afternoons.  Momma would spread the papers out all over the living room floor after church and read all afternoon.  She actually didn’t care much for the hard news.  She liked the human interest stories the best.  So after a quick scan of the headlines on the front page, she would lose herself in the triumphs and tragedies of her fellow humans. 

After several hours, Momma would wheedle Daddy into working a crossword puzzle with her.  Momma’s other passion was crosswords.  She  could work the New York Times, Sunday crossword in ink in 45 minutes.  “It’s not because I’m smart,” she would say, “It’s because I read so much.”

Daddy would humor her for a little while as they snuggled on the couch.  Eventually, they would go to their bedroom for a nap.  Of course, I now know that they weren’t napping, but when I was eight years old it all seemed plausible enough. 

Momma never cooked dinner on Sunday nights, not even if we had company.  “Fend for yourselves,” she would say as soon as we were old enough.  There were always plenty of leftovers and once I was old enough to hold down a job we could order out. 

I, of all my siblings, inherited Momma’s love of books to its greatest degree.  Many a night would find me burrowed beneath my sheets, making tunnels like that kid in The Velveteen Rabbit, only a book was my companion instead of bunny.  I didn’t have to sneak to stay up reading like some kids.  Momma didn’t care.  I just liked the solitude I found under the sheets, with my flashlight, the sound of pages turning, was, I was certain, the same sound the angel’s wings made.