Day 16: Bedtime
The jocks at my college didn’t play any of the usual sports. Their game of choice wasn’t even a game. It was a calisthenics program led by a Buddhist philosophy professor. It was called Iron Bookworm.
I went to that school because I love books. For most of my life, if you asked me what I did for fun, reading would be among my top three answers, next to skateboarding and climbing trees.
When the seventh Harry Potter book came out, I didn’t sleep for 24 hours. I finished it in one go lying belly down on the couch, my head hanging over the armrest, book resting on the floor.
My parents gifted me with this. A few days after I was born my dad started reading me Plato’s Republic to lull me to sleep. And every night for the five years, he or my mom would spend hours reading to me before bed.
My mom says I never looked at the pictures or the words on the page. Whenever she read to me, my eyes were fixed on her mouth, watching how it moved and formed the words she was speaking.
Sometimes she would get really into a book we are reading together, and after she put me to sleep she would keep going. Apparently I could always tell, and I would scold her for it. “Don’t read ahead mom!” I started reminding her when she’d say goodnight.
I was young enough then that I don’t remember these nights reading together. But I know without question they have fundamentally shaped my relationship to my parents. It was one of the main ways that we showed and shared our love for each other.
Books were a big deal in my dad’s home too. His mom studied library science, and as recently as a few years ago ran the library in the retirement home where she lives. Her hobby was collecting ABC books of every shape and size. And judging by their bookshelves, my grandpa studied history like his life depended on it.
They were an Irish Catholic family. And my dad was the youngest of eight kids.
He once told my grandma about how he and my mom would read to me every night. he wondered if they had done the same with him.
This apparently brought her to tears. because she checked with my grandpa, and the answer was no. They hadn’t read to my dad. Not once.
They themselves read every single night. My dad remembers them sitting by the fire in the rocking chairs, each of them absorbed in a book.
”We figured you’d just pick it up by example,” my grandpa told him.
Now obviously my dad did find his way to books without their guiding hands. Their strategy worked to that extent at least.
But he also grew up not knowing if or how much his parents loved him.
Unfortunately for all three of them, it took 50 years for this fact to come to light.
It’s easy to go about our lives thinking that we’re giving our loved ones and ourselves everything necessary to get by.
But that’s a dangerous assumption to make. Because if we don’t pay close attention — to others and ourselves — we may never realize that the one thing we’re not giving is the one thing we need the most: love.