Reading books.....

I've always loved books.  When I was about four years old, I longed so much to read that I begged my older sister to teach me, so we began with the alphabet.  We only got through the first seven or eight letters before the tutoring ceased.  But I was determined:  I figured out the rest and taught myself to read.

My education, though, was scattered.  I attended ten schools in six states by the time I finished high school, so it's no wonder that I lacked focus.  But I became strongly motivated again as I took classes at seven colleges and universities, and taught as a graduate student at two.  I knew what I wanted, and my specialty was academic research. I practically lived in the library.  At one university in fact, I also worked in the main library on campus--for one long summer blissfully in charge of of shelving for over a million volumes on six floors of stacks.  Books were my world.  And then my world upside down:  I forgot how to read.

For several years, I had been ill.  Nothing major.  Nothing the doctors could precisely explain.  Just ill and never getting entirely well.  So I kept pressing forward until, after one bout of illness, I discovered that  there was a problem with the final exam essays that my students had written.  The words crawled all over the page.  The scribbles looked unfamiliar, foreign, indecipherable.  I couldn't read.  Left with no choice and no way forward, I quit graduate school and moved home with my parents--still somehow sure that I would get myself sorted out, sure that I would get better if I tried hard enough.  But I was trapped: I could not get well, and I was never able to join the academic world again.

During that first difficult year, I learned to think differently, to make adjustments, to cope.  By checking out large print books from the library and by working literally thousands of crosswords, I taught myself again to read.  Sometimes, still, I cannot focus on a printed page.  For weeks at a time, words go squirrelly.  Mostly I can read websites on the computer by dramatically increasing text size.  If you love to read and to write, you find a way.  Reading is a privilege that I don't take for granted.  

Life is rarely easy, and it is sometimes unfair.  But that's neither reason nor excuse for losing hope.  Things are sweeter when we have to work hard to find results.  As someone I admire once said, "There is no true genius; there is only working hard without ever giving up."

Yesterday, online, I bought six books.