Well, the story I love to tell is
my mother would cajole into washing dishes and so we’d clean up every night and then she’d sit and read poetry and I would was dishes, it was long before dishwashers. And every night dishes took longer and longer and longer, you know I would just linger over the sink.
And the poetry she read, some of it was perfectly appropriate, some it was like Alfred Lord Tennyson, things like the “Highwaymen.” you know, I mean they weren’t even appropriate for third and fourth graders at all, but it didn’t matter, it was the sound of the language. It was being there, it was that memory of doing something together and of having that language. And you know I can pickup certain poems today and I hear my mother’s voice in, in my mind.
My grandmother was the great reader, she just, she had books all over her house. Every summer we went to the Marietta, Ohio public library, the first thing I did when I checked into town and we would get piles and piles and piles of books. And I went to that library oh maybe ten years ago, and I walked up the stairs and I felt like my grandmother was holding my hand I knew exactly where to turn, where the children’s room was.
I knew the layout of, hadn’t changed by the way in many, many a year. I knew the layout of the library and I hadn’t been in there for three decades. So there was a tremendous physical, visual memory as well with those books. So yeah, I think that when I think of the books of my childhood, there’s a teacher associated with them, there’s a librarian associated with them who put that book in my hand, or there’s a family member.
And
those memories are whole, you know, they’re people and books and that’s a wonderful way to remember your childhood.