A lifetime of reading

I buy way too many books.

I used to buy too many CDs, but all of the CD stores disappeared, so you can only buy them now at Wal-Mart, which only carries CDs by Kenny Chesney, Hannah Montana or Mariah Carey. Plus I won’t go in a Wal-Mart at gunpoint.

There are still bookstores, thankfully, and I can hardly walk in one without emerging with an armload of books. Then I bring them home and they are spread around the house, much to my wife’s chagrin. Our bonus room looks like a library after an earthquake.

I started early, reading sports books and Encyclopedia Brown and The Hardy Boys. The bookmobile would come through the neighborhood (I’m showing my age) and I would get literary classics such as The NFL’s Greatest Receivers or Amazing Baseball Teams. To this day, I retain a lot of knowledge about the Gashouse Gang.

When I was in the fifth grade, I began reading a lot more, because my parents sent me to this dopey private Christian school, since there were rumors of forced busing that year and I’d be forced to attend a different school across town. The private school was experimenting with some sort of “learn at your own pace” hokum, in which they’d give you a workbook, and you’d take a test at the end of it.

Apparently, all of my fellow fifth-graders had spend their formative years in a cave, because it took them six weeks to do each workbook, and I generally finished mine in about three days. They wouldn’t let me jump ahead, so I was left to do nothing but sit there and daydream about a girl named Candy who sat on the next row. By the way, if you want to guarantee your daughter grows up to be a stripper, name her “Candy.”

To alleviate my boredom, the teacher allowed me to sit there and read all day while my classmates struggled to remember the capital of California and how to do long division. The first really long book I ever read was Heidi, and to this day I have a weakness for lederhosen.

My children have a similar love of books, perhaps in part because I read to them every night when they were smaller, and didn’t consider me an idiot. This led to one of my more shameful moments as a parent. When my son was about 4, he had a children’s version of A Christmas Carol, and he wanted me to read it to him. Every. Single. Night.

I’d say “How about Go Dog, Go, or The Cat In The Hat?” Nope. He wanted to read “Scrooge,” as he called it. This went on, no kidding, for about three months. I didn’t think I could bear to read it one more time. So one day, when he wasn’t there, I took the book, and I hid it under the couch.

He came to me that night and said “I can’t find Scrooge!” He was distraught, and asked me if I’d seen it. And just like the Grinch, when he told little Cindy Lou Who that he was taking her Christmas tree to his workshop to repair a light, I looked in the child’s face and lied. And I didn’t even feel ashamed.

On the bright side, Scrooge was forgotten. For about two weeks, anyway, until he found it, and brought it triumphantly to the couch one night, a big smile on his face, and we plunged right back into the world of Christmas ghosts.

God bless us, every one.