Chapter 19

We were a family of book worms. Library aficionados. Book club subscribers. Avid readers. You get my drift.

Late at night, after the kitchen was spotless and the house quiet. Mother took time to read in peace before she went to bed. Daddy had a book going all the time. Andrea was always being scolded to put down her book and help with chores.  Cindy and I read everything we could get our hands on. Well, I read. Cindy listened. She said reading made her eyes tired. 

It started with ne reading her the Sunday funnies.  Blondie, Peanuts, Prince Valiant, and so on. Then “we” read the comics we salvaged from the local garbage dump. Then books. The Bobbsey Twins, Nancy Drew, the Hardy Boys. Then on to the horse books – Black Beauty, the Black Stallion stories by Welter Farley that Andrea, the horse lover, passed down to us. And dog books, like Lassie Come Home, all the collie books by Albert Payson Terhune, and stories by Jim Kjelgaard. One of my favorites was a book about an abused dog who gets a happy ending, titled “Beautiful Joe.” I cried every time I read it.

Then I discovered, accidentally, Classic Comics. It was a series of comics we had sort of ignored with the dump stash, but there they were: Man in the Iron Mask, Count of Monte Cristo, Lorna Doone, Moby-Dick, Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer. Suddenly, the stories of my childhood seemed shallow and unsatisfying.

My freshman year, I discovered Les Misérables, and Of Human Bondage (an eye-opener!) and other literature not in our book shelf at home or (God forbid!) the Catholic school library.

Mother liked Steinbeck, especially “ East of Eden’ and “Grapes of Wrath,”  and any stories about overcoming hardship, and was a superfan of “Gone with the Wind” and ordered “To Kill a Mockingbird,” from her Book-of-the-Month club.  Daddy liked Westerns and everything else she brought home. But these high school library books were a revelation. I read just about every book in that small library before I graduated. And supplemented it with our we bi-weekly trips to the Buffalo library, where the librarian helped me pick out books.

In high school, I began reading Hemingway and Faulkner and Fitzgerald. Didn’t like “The Great Gatsby” or “Turn of the Screw” which probably says more about me than the books.  Found Moby-Dick boring and once messed up the due date for a book report and had to read all 800,000 pages (it seemed) of “David Copperfield” in a weekend! (Where were the condensed cheat versions when I was needing them?) My all-time favorite, though, was “Jane Eyre.”  What is it about books that make me cry? I’ve read it half a dozen times in my life and it never gets old.

Books changed my life. I even remember when it happened.

My early favorite was the book I got for my 10th birthday. We had read an excerpt from “Call of the Wild,” the Jack London classic, in our Weekly Reader at school. I wanted the whole story, so I asked for it for my birthday. I don’t know how Mother got it, there being no bookstore in Maple Lake or anywhere nearby, but she did.

It was a sunny October day, and a Saturday, so I took the book outside after breakfast, found a big pile of leaves in the gentle fall sun, and settled in to read. I read the whole thing that mooring and cried my eyes out at the end.  Wen in the house for lunch and was restless. So I took the book and went back outside. It was getting chilly, so I took shelter in the big purple Metro truck – Daddy was doing chores around the place that day. I sat in the driver’s seat behind the giant windshield, put my feet up on the steering wheel, and read the whole thing again. Cried again at the end. And decided that this was what I wanted to do: write stories like that. It was a turning point in my life that I didn’t recognize until much later. I wanted to be a writer like Jack London.  I never wavered from that goal through all my years in school. It’s who I am. OK, I’m no Jack London, but it’s as much of who I am as brown eyes and curly hair. I have no choice. 

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EPILOGUE

By Cindy Adams

Linda was my ‘gateway drug’ into the world of books, and when she read me “Call of the Wild” (I was 8) I knew that someday, somehow, I would go North. I would eventually spend 45 years in Alaska during which time I visited Jack London’s cabin in Dawson City, Yukon.

Now don’t laugh, but the other book that stuck with me and contributed to my insatiable sense of adventure was . . . wait for it! …The Bobbsey Twins On a Bicycle Trip. I used to lie in bed at night and pack and repack my bike bags for my trip. Many years later, standing in a bedroom packing for a three-week hike in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge I started to chuckle realizing I was packing for my own Bicycle Trip.

Much like Linda, many books helped to shape my life. I haven’t owned a TV for at least 40 years or more because what was the use when I only tended to turn it off and stick my nose in a good book? But I thank Linda for my indoctrination into these wonderful worlds.