by Alice Ozma
“You have to talk to someone about this!” I insisted.
“It’s not going to do any good.”
For the sake of the children, he did send an e-mail: a polite message to one of the people he’d met with asking for some clarification as to why his notes from the meeting differed so much from the letter he’d received. The response was short and curt, saying that he “obviously must have misunderstood” the discussion at the meeting. He sent a follow-up e-mail, and then another, but got no response. For the first time in his life, he visited a doctor about his stress. The doctor strongly suggested that my father was putting his health, and possibly his life, at risk by staying at work. So my father went on medical leave for several months, hoping for some kind of change. Then the call came in from a friend of his—if the rumors were to be believed, every single book had been removed from the library. The room that had so recently been stripped of its homey decor was now stripped of the last thing that made it, by definition, a library.
At the age of sixty-one and in great physical condition aside from the stress, my father retired from the job he had hoped to keep until he could no longer walk up the stairs.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Once the tugboat takes you out to the ocean liner, you got to get all the way on board. Can’t straddle both decks.
—Katherine Paterson, The Great Gilly Hopkins
For the first few weeks after my father retired, I came home as often as I could, just to make sure he was all right. Sometimes we didn’t even make conversation—I just spent the day sitting beside him, letting him know he was not alone. When he went to bed, I’d talk to him until he fell asleep and then sit in my bedroom, listening to his peaceful breathing until it made me sleepy. At that point, finally relaxed and convinced that things were going to be okay, I’d call my boyfriend. On the phone with him, our problems seemed less stressful. I laughed. I escaped a world where librarians and books didn’t matter. I felt like it was okay to start moving, slowly and cautiously, toward something brighter and happier. Because I knew my father would think of something, and mostly because I needed to sleep eventually.
“Just one more story and I’ll go to bed,” I said, yawning loudly and obviously to make the statement seem more truthful. I was actually starting to get sleepy, but not quite sleepy enough.
“Come on,” he said, “You said that before the last story. It’s not going to work twice.”
“But I really wasn’t tired then! And I am now. You’re being unreasonable. I can’t help it.”
“Fine,” he sighed, not quite as annoyed as he was trying to sound, “what should it be about?”
“Wait,” I whispered, “I think my dad is saying something.”
We waited in silence until I realized that he was whistling a song in his sleep. I giggled.
“False alarm.”
I took the phone deeper under the covers and put my pillows around my head to create a sound barrier. Without coming out I reached my arm behind my head to turn off my light. The room was cool and dark. The air conditioner kicked on just in time to muffle my voice even more.
“Listen, bud,” Dan said, “I am fading fast. Can we keep this one short?”
“No, you said that last night! You said that last night and I went to bed wide awake.”
“You got two stories last night and you’re getting three tonight! How come I’m always the one who has to tell them? You tell great stories—tell one to me.”
“It doesn’t count, you’re already sleepy. When you can’t sleep I’ll tell one to you.”
Dan made a grumbling noise on the other end of the phone as he thought.
“All right,” he began, “Once upon a time, there was a hedgehog.”
“What was his name?”
“Worthington.”
“Eee,” I squealed with delight, “Worthington! That is great.”
“And Worthington thought he was very fierce—the fiercest of all beasts, in fact.”
“But he was just a hedgehog.”
“Don’t say it like that! What if I said you were just a girl?”
“I would say you that you are right, but I am a very nice girl. I am small but mighty.”
“What happened to keeping this quick?”
“Sorry, okay, so Worthington thought he was the most ferocious of the beasts.”
“Yes. But when he had to babysit a group of tiny turtles, he suddenly felt a little less ferocious.”
I snuggled up in a ball and let him talk, smiling as Worthington went on a quest to find blueberries for his new friends and gasping when he ran into a large, hairy sloth. Of course the sloth was also looking for blueberries, and they were able to help each other out. Except the sloth was secretly afraid of Worthington’s quills—I added that part.
I can’t remember when I started asking my boyfriend to tell me bedtime stories regularly. We started dating in college. Time had already passed since The Streak had ended and I had been reading myself to sleep, but it wasn’t quite the same. I wanted to hear someone’s voice as I drifted off, someone sitting close by. For most of my life this had been the norm, and I was finding it very hard to adjust to other sounds at bedtime. The radio kept me up; the television made me cranky. Sometimes I could hear people fighting in the hallway outside of my room, but that wasn’t quite the comforting thing I was looking for, either. In the spring there were crickets that reminded me of home, but I was on the second floor and could just barely make out their music even when I slid my bed against the window and slept with my head pushed against the screen. I had trouble falling asleep without our tradition.
Dan and my father have very little in common, which is something I like about both of them. They don’t remind me of each other, and I don’t think they should. Asking Dan to read to me would have been all wrong. But he is an excellent storyteller. Once, when I was upset from an argument with a friend and unable to get myself into any sort of a relaxed state, Dan perched himself on the edge of my bed before he left for the night and put his hand on my forehead, brushing my curls out of my eyes.
“Have you ever wondered,” he asked, “if sheep get things caught in their wool?”
I laughed in spite of myself.
“What are you talking about? I guess they do. Maybe branches and leaves and things.”
“No, I mean household objects. Towels and spatulas and things. Cat toys. Measuring spoons.”
“I’ve honestly never thought about it,” I said, trying to imitate his serious tone but smiling.
“Can you imagine what a pain it must be to have pet sheep? I bet every night before you put them to bed, you have to line them up and shake them out.”
“Shake them out?!” I was giddy from the idea and my toes curled under the covers.
“Yes, it simply must be done. There’s no way around it. If you don’t shake out your sheep before they go to bed, you will lose so many important things. You will spend the rest of your life looking for the remote. And it’s not like they like it, either. How would you like to wake up with a paddleball in your sheets? It might sound fun now, but someone could get seriously hurt!”
This thread continued for several nights. Sheep in general turned into three specific sheep: Madeline, Paul, and Gertrude. They lived in my house and tried every night to sneak something past me. It was their goal to someday, somehow, make toast in their bedroom at night. But I knew what they were up to and always remembered to shake them out before they went to bed, because eating in bed would get everything crumby. Then the sheep developed personalities. Gertrude was a troublemaker, always scheming but never planning anything more mischievous than sneaking an extra dessert. Madeline was feminine, outgoing, and fun-loving. She wore lipstick and liked to try on my shoes when I was out of the house. Paul was actually the nicest, only no one would ever know it because his sisters were always framing him. I felt bad for Paul, though, so sometimes he got to be the hero.
Once we had recurring characters, they developed recu
rring friends. And then like a good TV show, the friends got their own spin-offs, and soon we had a repertoire of thirty or more animals, each with distinct personalities and quirks. They were well-rounded, too; no one was ever all good or all bad. Sometimes they got in fights and sometimes they played awful tricks on each other. It was all highly entertaining, maybe even more than it should have been for two college students.
Life without The Streak was a strange adjustment, and these stories were never quite a substitute. Nothing was the same as being read to by the same person every night without missing a night for years on end. I am content with that—nothing ever has to come close. But at night, when reading to myself was too quiet and my dad was miles away, those stories helped me hold on to a part of my life that I wasn’t quite ready to let go of yet, and this lasted all the way through college. And whenever I was home, my father read to me all the time: snippets from the newspaper, portions from a book he was flipping through in the next room. I read to him, too: sections of my writing or e-mails from my sister. We tackled new books even after The Streak ended. A reading family never stops reading. Most nights when I’m home, he’ll read in his room and I’ll read in my room, and we’ll call out funny or thought-provoking passages to each other until he falls asleep. Then I’ll grab my cell phone, crawl under the covers, and try to keep my voice down to avoid waking him.
“Hello,” I say when Dan answers, “I was wondering what you are going to tell me tonight. Because I think you should know ahead of time that you’ve got your work cut out for you. I’m not even a little bit tired.”
In the room next door I hear my father clear his throat and roll over. I wonder if I am keeping him awake. I wonder if he feels replaced, hearing someone else tell me my bedtime story. I wonder if it bothers him. Then he flops on his back and snores loudly. I smile.
“Go on,” I whisper into the phone. “Just one more story and I’ll go to bed.”
CHAPTER THIRTY
Fawkes is a phoenix, Harry. Phoenixes burst into flames when it is time for them to die and are reborn from the ashes. Watch him.
—J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
My father and I still sulked occasionally. It was the natural thing to do, I think, when someone lost something so important to them—when reading was phased out. But other things came up. The constant snow we’d been getting that winter finally stopped. I had an interview for a program at the University of Pennsylvania, and it gave us something to talk about. Then I got in, and it gave us something to be excited about. We ate meals outside and visited museums. Eventually, we started to feel better.
But my father couldn’t just sit at home and adjust to retired life. He enjoyed waking up whenever he wanted, and going back to bed if he felt like it, and taking walks right in the middle of the day when the idea suited him. But he missed reading. So he found a way to do it anyway.
“I’m going to the old folks’ home.”
“I don’t think that’s politically correct. Also, you just retired. You are in great shape. There is no reason to put you in a home.”
“Obviously I’m fit as a fiddle, you birdhead. I’m going to volunteer there, reading to the old-timers.”
For the record, I am not, nor have I ever been to my knowledge, a birdhead.
“What will you read?”
“Picture books.”
“To adults?”
“Why not?”
“Won’t they be offended?”
“I’ll tell them not to be.”
“I don’t think it works that way.”
But as it turns out, it did work exactly that way. My father spent weeks practicing the best of the best books from his personal collection—classics that he’d read to me, like Merry Christmas, Space Case, Nosy Mrs. Rat, Milo’s Hat Trick, and Nightgown of the Sullen Moon. He made plans to visit three retirement homes in one Friday morning. He got up early to practice, and of course, he put on a well-ironed dress shirt and a tie. When he arrived, he explained to them that picture books were what he thought he did best. He wasn’t trying to insult them—quite the opposite, actually. He was expressing kindness in the form he knew best, and he hoped they would try to enjoy themselves.
They did. As he described it, they were “mesmerized.” They smiled for heroes and cute children and shook their heads disapprovingly when villains appeared. They clapped after every book, and discussed the reading among themselves for a moment before the next book started. My father admitted that a few had fallen asleep at one point or another, but that was to be expected when working with the elderly, and he was not offended. If anything, he decided that he was lulling them into a pleasant late morning nap and making them feel perfectly relaxed. I can testify from some of the close-call, quarter-to-midnight reading sessions that his voice can, at times, have a sonorous quality.
He was extremely pleased with the results of his endeavor, especially since this was a new and unexplored audience for him. He kept up his reading dates every Friday, and the crowds got bigger. A month or so into this routine, he described a scene that I found especially heartwarming:
“I came in to read to my last group of the day, and there was this huge crowd in one room, in rows and rows of chairs, maybe forty or more people. They were all facing the same way, and I assumed they were watching a movie. Well I was pretty disappointed, since this was my usual reading time and they knew I was coming, but I decided I would just have to read to whoever was free. I went up to the front desk to sign in, and the woman told me, ‘They’re waiting for you.’ She pointed at that same room, and I realized that everyone was sitting quietly, looking at me.”
That day, my father read to his largest-ever adult audience. The feeling electrified him more than anything else he had done in my recent memory. He couldn’t stop raving about the experience, in every phone call and during every car trip, going over again and again the surprise and sudden rush of joy he felt when he realized that all of those people were there to listen to him read. After feeling like his talent was useless for so long, he was reassured and elated to be getting such a great response. He started adding more and more books to his collection, finally getting to try out stories that might have been too difficult for elementary school students. It was his much-needed rebirth, and he practiced his technique now more than ever before.
Then he added a local preschool to his list, and found that, despite what his school district might have led him to believe, children loved being read to just as much as he remembered. Once he thought of volunteering at a hospital to read to children before they underwent surgery, I was almost convinced he’d never have to think of the public school system again.
But inevitably, his mind wandered back to the children he had left behind. After working in a school made up mostly of minorities and almost entirely of children who qualified for free lunches from the state, he always worried about the students who slip through the cracks. A library without books seemed like a nightmarish punishment for students who desperately needed literacy to move on in the world and rise out of poverty. I knew that he couldn’t settle with the injustice for too long. His announcement did not come as a surprise.
“I’m running for the school board,” he said one day, as though waking up from a long nap.
“After all of that headache, you’re going to jump right back into the school system? It’s honorable, but I’m not sure that it’s smart.”
“What happened is not right, and if I can fix it, I am going to.”
“What if you can’t?”
“Look, Lovie, I’m not saying this won’t be difficult. But someone has to step in before reading disappears from schools altogether. Former teachers never run for the board—it’s always former administrators. They need my perspective. But I think the most important thing is that they need someone who knows what is going on, and what our students are losing.”
I knew all of this before he said it, but I wanted to hear him say it, because I needed to hear th
e passion in his voice. I was and always will be in his corner, but it was an even better place to be once I realized that he still had some fight left in him.
“You know, you make a pretty convincing argument.”
“That’s a relief. I think that will come in handy when elections roll around next year.”
“Next year? That’s a long time.”
“So I’ve got time to prepare.”
And so he does. For now, he lives a pretty typical retired life, volunteering and working on projects around the house. He goes grocery shopping on Thursday mornings and listens to baseball on the radio. In my mind, that makes him all the more interesting. He is like a superhero, practicing living a normal life before starting his career as a defender of libraries, books, and the all-important art of reading. When elections come, and the town realizes the threat it is facing, he will fight for what is good and right in the world, and protect us from disaster. But first, he has to practice his cover.
We have a birdbath in our front yard. It’s on a little platform that my dad made out of cinder blocks so that he could watch the birds from the living room window. But more often than not, he prefers to be on the porch. He brings a book, and maybe a dish of ice cream, and he sits in a rocking chair. He doesn’t actually rock—he tries to stay still so that the birds don’t fly away. Sometimes he doesn’t even open the book. He rests it on his lap and counts the birds as they come by. He looks like he is waiting for something, because he is. He’s waiting for a change. He made a commitment that he still can’t seem to shake.
We called it The Reading Streak, but it was really more of a promise. A promise to each other, a promise to ourselves. A promise to always be there and to never give up. It was a promise of hope in hopeless times. It was a promise of comfort when things got uncomfortable. And we kept our promise to each other.
