Crawl between my covers

My relationship with books is tried and true, reaching back as far as any I've experienced yet, save the one I share with my parents.

I can remember the very first school book I had, red, with a dappled brown horse on it and maybe fifteen pages worth of stories primed to a 1st grader's vocabulary and ability.

And yet, like good literature, I was always ahead of my time when it came to bound experience on the page.

in my childhood, I thought nothing of checking out a stack of books half as tall as me during my weekly trips to the town library. When my mom was in college and I had access to the college library, I traveled to Egypt (Cleopatra), Europe (The Brothers Grimm, Spain (Hemingway) and beyond. When we went fishing, I sat in the boat (or on the ice) and read. Flying, camping, golfing, you name it. I had my nose stuck in a book.

In those days, it was a cake walk (book sale?) to breeze through a stack of books six deep in a week.

By the time I left my little country school, I had read most of the books in our meager library.

Now that my vision is a little bit ganked, I'm not as speedy as I used to be. Add a putt-putt memory and I'm even slower, because I want to remember what it took so long to read and understand.

But I still love language, the words, the stories, the ideas to be found in books.

"Sex cannot do for me what words can," wrote one of my favorite authors, Ursula K. Le Guin. She nailed the essence of a literary life in that sentence, and to this day it stands out in my mind.

Whenever I slip between the musky, soft covers of a new book, the experience is divine. I choose my books with more care than my lovers; some things in life are more important than others.