The Weight of Reading

I was talking to a coworker the other day who came into the break room and slammed down his copy of Go Down Moses by Faulkner. “I cannot get these kids to care. How can I engage them in the text when they don’t even know what they are reading?”

I picked up the book. Never a huge fan of Faulkner myself (except for his essays and his Pulitzer acceptance speech), I began to flip through it. “This book isn’t marked”, I said. In fact, it looked as though it hadn’t even been skimmed through. The spine was in pristine condition; the pages were crisp; the price tag was still on the cover.

Somewhere we have managed to skip over the almighty and authoritative quality of loving the weight of a book. That immeasurable success and pride that comes with traveling to the last point of pagination that screams “A job well done” cannot be replicated. As a teacher, one of the first things I do when I give a new book to a child (as hippie as it sounds) is to bend it. Break it in. Smell it. Flip through it. Look at the names of the chapters. Read the last page. Make the book your property.

This sense of ownership is what we value with every piece of property we purchase, and more so when something is given as a gift to us. This... perfection of weighted importance, a commitment to the page, is something that has to be taught. No love of information or knowledge comes until you accept ownership of the information you receive.

I read everything. I read directions. I read emails. I read papers. I read blogs, book reviews, trashy magazines, and novels. I read mostly on the train. I read when I am waiting for my name to be called for some insane amount of red tape I have to sift through to get to whatever the next step is. I read when I wait for friends to meet me places. I read when I am bored. I read when I am sad, happy, lonely, confused, anxious, and overwhelmed.

By the time I get on the train, I have stared at technology most of the day. I have sent texts, waited for texts, emailed, returned phone calls, and sat through countless presentations. By the time I finally get to venture home, I have had someone or something else doing most of the thinking for me. When I read, I have the opportunity to escape from noise and actually use my brain (although it’s usually tired from working all day)… and it doesn’t feel like work at all.

For me, reading works my imagination. It forces me to think about what I enjoy or believe and why. Most importantly though, reading gives me something to give back to the universe. When I think about  all of the opinions and absolutes that I have stored in my mind over the years and had turned upside down by something I have read, I realize that I have yet to formulate an original idea. But the conversation of ideas, now that is true scholarship. To have a verbal exchange of ideas and findings with others is one of the greatest joys in this life… and it costs virtually nothing.

I think that one of the greatest compliments we can ever pay another human is to give them a book. It communicates to someone that you not only know them well enough to purchase something that they might enjoy, but it tells them that you think they have drive and intelligence. You see them as someone who will finish a task, who doesn’t give up when presented with other options that might provide more immediate gratification, and as someone who needs to learn on a regular basis. In my mind and in a perfect world it also says, "Someday I want to talk to you about this." and just like that, there is a dangling conversation to be had between you and this other person whom you value. That is what I want my students to understand when I hand them a new book. This is the begining of a conversation I want to have with you about something important, because you are important to me.         

Our students may never love Go Down Moses (I don’t), and we’re going to have to be okay with that. There isn’t any reason why they should or why we should try and make them. My bigger concern and my biggest hope for my students is that they love any book. I am convinced that if they can manage to own a book and commit to knowing the information and characters inside, starting with the shape and weight and pages of a book, we might make lifelong learners out of them after all.

My Summer Camp

I’m not a nostalgic person. In fact, I tend to think that nostalgia can be a pretty dangerous thing. Nostalgia is usually the past as we choose to remember it, as opposed to how something actually occurred. We often create memories in places where we cannot fill in the gaps, a prosthetic memory, if you will. Whenever I am with a collective group of friends, I am always referenced as “the goldfish”, since I cannot seem to recall some of “the best times we ever had”.  This usually makes me sad (that I cannot recall specifics of major formative points in my childhood), but there is a time and place that I can remember rather well.

I had a pretty average childhood, and like many kids, I grew up going to a summer camp. My summer camp was this sweet collection of cabins in the Texas Hill Country.  In the summers you could sleep with the windows open and wake up freezing. In the winters you could smell campfire on your clothes for a week after you came back from a midwinter retreat. The summers were the best, though.

When people ask about my summer camp, they usually ask if we had horses, bike trails, mountain climbing, water tubes, and Camp Olympics. In a word, no.

We went to a camp that encouraged us to eat food bathed in butter. We went to a camp that had a softball field that had not actually had a softball game played on it since the 1980s, but what we used for countless fictitious games that activities directors before us had made up involving dodge balls, Nerf bats, and deflated soccer balls. We wore blocks of wood around our neck with our names on them, which would later become a method of precious currency exchanged between best friends, campers and counselors, and your camp romance. One summer, I actually got the brilliant idea to create a mosaic nametag out of tile and grout and give it to my best friend… who wore it until a rather unfortunate incident on said softball field. (I mean, it did weigh about six pounds, so I can understand why she had to remove it from nametag rotation.)

When we were finally old enough to become camp counselors, we began to follow in former counselors’ footsteps. We doled out canteen (a privilege for counselors only), distributed ear drops, led swim tests, sat in the back row for movie and bonfire night… and sneaked off a few times ourselves. We pranked one another and snuck into opposite genders’ spaces after hours. The best prank I ever personally participated in involved making Jello in a toilet using dry ice.

We traded cabins for the day and shared our care packages. We got dressed up for dances and danced with campers all night long until the last song came on. We went out for staff lunches after a session was over and vowed to work there for an entire summer once we were old enough.

And it was great.

No, it wasn’t real life. It didn’t last. My memories are lacking the sensation of being hot and tired and sweaty. My memories lack frustration, fatigue, and a general disdain for Frito Pie when it’s 116 degrees inside of the dining hall. But for a short time we all lived in a space that we truly loved. And we were great there together.

I have never really desired to go back to this summer camp. When I worked my last summer, I drove out of those gates at warp speed. After an entire summer, you find that you have in fact, “gone native”, and highway with your windows down never looked so good. My summer camp is very different than it was when I was there. That’s OK. It should change and grow and be something wonderful to kids. Our collective, prosthetic memories do not make our experience any less valuable because they came in older cabins or on handwritten canteen cards. Our memories are not less beautiful because they were paved on a baby blue Activities Building floor instead of a golden street.

I haven’t seen most of the people I went to summer camp with in years. If we saw one another, I have no doubt that our meeting would be filled with a lot of laughter, and maybe even a little sadness for people who can’t be with us. It would definitely be filled with plenty of grace and love.  

I may never go to a camp reunion. I will never make another nametag. I’ll never spend another night in a cabin (thank God). I’ll never eat chicken fingers and chocolate milk in the dining hall after hours, visit the chapel, or work with the same people ever again.

 I will never make friends like the ones I had when I was twelve years old.

Jesus. Does anyone?