Peanut the Horse.

''Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read. '' Groucho Marx
The ironing board was a fixture in our kitchen. My father hated it; my mother used it every day.She wasn't about to take down and put up that ironing board everytime she had to use it, so there it stood Back then, everything needed to be ironed, and my mother even ironed things that didn’t need ironing.. Having grown up poor, she wasn’t about to let her family wear wrinkled clothes--even if the wrinkles only existed in her imagination and the clothes she was ironing didn’t show.
Anyway. I remember quite distinctly that I was sitting comfortably under the ironing board, the kitchen lights bright, my mother in her usual spot in front of the stove making supper.
Now, to ask why I chose to sit under the ironing board is to have forgotten what it is like to be five and have a treasure in your hands that made you feel proud and important.
My treasure was a little brown book about a horse named Peanut. Honest. I remember the color of the book, the feel and shape of the pages, the name of the horse. .
We always went to the library Saturday afternoon. After my mother finished baking the weekend pie: apple in the fall, blueberry in the summer; sometimes lemon meringue; she would wash her hands, take off her apron, turn off whatever opera was being broadcast from the Metropolitan Opera House, and we would walk to the library. Good Catholics, this walk served two purposes: a visit to the library, and confession.
That day--I would guess I was 5--I took out my own book, an I was going to read it by myself.
And so, under the ironing board,Ii began to read aloud about Peanut the horse. My sister, in the living room by her grown up self, demanded of my mother: “Make her read in her head.” My mother, a staunch supporter of reading, chided my sister, telling her I was just learning to read and I wasn’t bothering anyone. And that was the beginning of a journey.
He was a kindly but strange man. Linncolnesque in stature and demeanor. I see myself standing in front of the desk as he peered down at me, took the form I had printed my name on, and gave me my library card. I think I was the youngest person ever to get a library card. I was proud.
We grew up with books. The youngest of 4 my father was quite shy, would run and climb a tree with a book whenever company arrived. My mother, the oldest surviving daughter,took her siblings to the library. The children of poor immigrant parents, reading was free, educational, and fun, and so they read. And so we were read to, and eventually read ourselves. One of my earliest memories is of going to a library story hour after I had gotten a small pox vaccination. The librarian was reading a book from the ‘Ned and Nina series. I must have been 2 1/2 or 3. I wore a white pinafore and the ruffle was pinned up so it wouldn’t irritate the shot.
My mother read to us after supper, though that seemed to end when she began to fall asleep reading “Robinson Crusoe.” She read us traditional British children’s literature: it took me a long time to realize that the 5 little peppers who lived in a brown house weren’t peppers that grew in the earth, but children in a story who lived in a house painted brown. (At 5 my understanding of plant life was quite limited. I thought peppers grew underground like potatoes) She also read many of Lois Lenski’s socially conscious children’s literature.
Reading was a major source of entertainment. In the winter, after school, I would sit on the sofa under the lamp, a handful of cheerios or a hunk of provolone cheese as a snack, and read until supper time.
During the summer my sister and I would walk to the library together. For unknown reasons we were only allowed 4 books. So, one summer we decided to read all the Nancy Drew books in the library and since the library had an extensive collection each of us would take out the requisite four. We would go home, sit under the cool shade of the maple trees, and see who could finish her book first. Then we would trade books, and a few days later go back to the library for four more.
We had the Harvard Classics and the Books of Knowledge and I spent many a summer afternoon sitting on the floor,reading those books: turning the smooth pages of the Books of Knowledge, looking at the pictures; perusing the titles of the Harvard Classics, knowing they were beyond me.
And so I read and read and read. Easy books and hard books and thoughtful books and silly books and stupid books. History and biography and mystery and fiction and science. Reading was solace, adventure, escape, entertainment, engagement with the world. The Landmark series of historical biography; and some series of biographies that came in little orange books. And Joseph Altsheler's series of books about the Civil War and the French and Indian War. And Enid Blythe's stories. I read all 4 Mary Poppins books long before it became a movie. And Andrew Lang's fairy tales... I read. And I still read, the newspaper; magazines; books; websites on the Bible, billboards in Nicaragua; magazines in waiting rooms. I have read, I do read, I will read.
As my mother read to us; we read to our daughter; and I bring books to my Nicaraguan children and will read to them...a gift passed down; a tradition continued.
It is hard to imagine a world without books, a world where books are antique treasures in glass cases to be looked upon as archaic but quaint charming artifacts from a pretechnological world.
There is something about a book; something about turning the pages; holding the book; imagining its own adventures through its life. One day I might get a kindle or ebook; I can appreciate the convenience, the almost miraculous technology. But I cannot imagine a house without shelves of books whose names evoke shreds of the story, the ideas, the images that the book offered me. Books represent our shared past; tell our shared story; transmit our shared culture and traditions. Not that a kindle can’t or won’t do that, but there is something in the physicality of a book that communicates so much more than just the content....

--as yet unfinished.....