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REMEMBRANCE OF PAST ECHOES
Love of books often has little to do with the books themselves but with the surroundings, the time, the associations, the feelings, the fragrances and the adrenalin rushes.
Each booklover brings into a book a special burden, a special package of memories and expectations, a special preconceived notion of what a book is and what it will do for them.
One of my favorite customers repeatedly recaptures her childhood by purchasing all the books she remembers and therefore all the memories associated with them. She recalls with a glowing smile how her father read to her when she was small. He lay on the edge of her bed and read stories aloud while she snuggled close to his side and felt the warm vibrations of his voice through his chest.
Her memories include the wonderfully secure feeling she had during these childhood times, and she can call them up whenever she is reading in bed at night, those loving and just-right notions that children have that nothing bad is ever going to happen in life.
I can vividly remember what it was like to lie on the floor of the bedroom my brother Ronny and I shared and, while Ronny was outside methodically searching for four-leaf clover, I would read and re-read my favorite stories from our set of JUNIOR CLASSICS or our volumes of CHILDCRAFT.
The room was painted dark blue–at our request–and the curtains were filled with stars, so it wasn’t hard to take a trip outside our bodies whenever we pleased, into another solar system, over to the other side of the world, or deep into the innards of the earth, places where stories in books had already been.
My dog Brownie would lie there staring at me, waiting impatiently for me to get away from those books and come play with him, and he always enjoyed the game in which I stared intensely into his eyes from a distance of about six inches until he would finally snap at me to break the spell, never coming close enough to bite but always making me flinch back just in case.
Brownie himself has become part of my stories and he is thus now in existence both as a great memory and as the subject of tales that will someday be in books and blogs and podcasts. Perhaps someday Brownie and I will exist only as books, since all those people who have known us will have long passed.
My greatest hope is that the books Brownie and Ronny and I shared will survive us long enough to be enjoyed centuries later by kids who are finally coming back around to discovering these marvelous artifacts with pages and stains from little boys’ fingers and small dogs’ sniffings
© Jim Reed 2017 A.D.