Reading

Books speak to me – especially if they’re an audio book. (bah-da-bump, tss)

The town library in Dennis, Massachusetts is a bright and lovely building to spend a rainy afternoon in.

I’m not sure what attracts me to the Cape. It’s certainly not the traffic or the folks who drive way under the speed limit as though they prefer just driving above all else. I am glad if they are having the time of their life. The 50 cars behind them are not.

I realized that it’s the coast that I love, the ocean, the lighthouses, and the history. The trails in every town take us out of the sitting and waiting and into the doing and enjoying.

We knew rain was forecast today, so we decided to visit a library rather than a museum. On the way, we found the Captain Baker Donut Shop in West Dennis. It was raining so hard we could barely see 10 feet in front of us, so stopping there was an excellent spur-of-the-moment decision. I only regret the calories. The donuts are amazing! – definitely worth the side trip.

The rain became less torrential once we got to the library, but it’s been pouring with off and on ferocity since we got here. The time for the tornado warning we got on our phones has passed, but the severe thunderstorm warning continues for the next several hours.

The rain drumming on the roof is pleasing as I write, but it’s the books that win my heart every time.

The mixture of smells from new and old paper bring me back to childhood, and the treasures I found at our school library which spurred me on to visit more libraries to see what they had.

My favorite discoveries at 11 years old were from Thornton Burgess, who grew up in Sandwich, Mass, on the Cape, I just learned.

His Mother West Wind, and his many animal stories captivated me. I also found The Wind In The Willows, by Kenneth Grahame, along with several other books that I have forgotten the titles of but nevertheless found new worlds to lose myself in.

I thought that teaching would be a good career because I loved reading and I wanted to share those stories (and maybe instill the love of reading in others), but teaching, I learned, was more about managing behavior. I had also hoped to write children’s literature, but the stories that live in my head don’t want to come out on paper – or I haven’t been able to coax them out so far.

Books represent a kind of safety for me. Knowledge isn’t just power, but escape as well. I imagine alternate paths or endings when I read books now, and I often grieve the end of a captivating book.

How I loved those characters! They took me on their journey (or journeys), and let me in on their secrets, their fears, their hopes and their dreams – whether or not they were able to realize or accomplish what it was they thought they wanted to do, or be, or have.

The best characters to me are those who fail, but don’t give up. I get to discover the outcome along with them, and makes me wonder about the outcome of my own life.

My friends who have died have lost their chance to create or progress, and I am doing what I can to take action so I’ll have less regret.

Libraries are full of dreams realized, work completed, and an offering given to all who wish to enter.

The most loved authors have reached a kind of immortality – until access to their works are lost forever.

While I cannot recall all of the books I’ve read (some of which I’m glad to have forgotten), there are those few whose lines still come into my consciousness at times and encourage me to continue on.

James Baldwin’s book: Go Tell It On The Mountain is a masterful work.

Set in three sections, the narrative weaves the struggle of a family and its individual components through their church lives, and their salvation or resistance to their salvation.

What happens around them and throughout their experience as black people, whether in the south or in the north, elevates the characters’ deep existence in God’s world. Their religious belief and expression is their answer to enduring senseless violence and unwarranted hatred threaded throughout their lives.

The themes of sin and redemption, or striving for redemption, of rage, and of being saved – yet still a sinner – is felt in each page, in each individual’s journey.

As the novel opens with the eldest son, John, recalling his family’s church rituals and ‘the sinners’ the family passes on their way to Sunday services, the reader peeks at the family’s life in Harlem through John’s eyes. John expresses embarrassment by the demeanor and characters of the ‘sinners’ they pass as the family walks the four blocks to their storefront church, where their father is a deacon. John’s brother Roy expresses amusement at the ‘sinners’ behavior he witnesses as they walk past, and he expresses an attraction to that life.

Snatches of gospel song and verse propel the narrative forward through the several main characters’ thoughts and experiences, while the women elders and other sisters of the church, hover in the background, or come forward in prayer for the characters’ collective and individual souls throughout.

Instances of the family’s reality in a white world are shown through several scenes, but do not overpower the narrative of these characters’ lives. The reader experiences the world of the various characters and their choices, but are left to make of it what they will as they are propelled through the pages in a sometimes raw and dreadful torment.

The narrative compels the reader to bear witness – to understand the requirements of God to these characters – a forsaken people and their cries into the wilderness. The reader is kept rooted in each character’s living reality outside of the church, while unfurling a deep sense of these lives, and in the lives of their community through their spiritual connections and disconnections, and knowledge that their nearness to God is their only succor inside or outside of the human world.