My writing is ethereal. I don’t mean heavenly, I mean that instead of existing in reality, it exists on laptops and flat-screen monitors, Google phones and iPads. Pixels on screens bringing my words to you. So it has been, and so it continues to be.
Until now. Responding to some requests, I have emailed the text of my (as of yet unproduced) playto friends and relatives. I send the copies as PDFs, with the assumption that those kind enough to read the play will peruse it on whatever screen is at the nearest at whatever time is convenient.
But one friend pushed that little print icon on her screen (intentionally, I hope) and was soon swamped by 90 pages of my words, or rather the words of the half-dozen characters in my prison-life drama. She read and enjoyed and told me so.
I wasn’t home when she brought the pages to our house yesterday, so she left them with a request that I sign the cover page and return it to her. And I plan to do that. But not until I have spent time enjoying the pleasure of seeing my work in print.
I know I could have printed a copy at any time, just as I could have printed out any of my blogs. But I never have. I never saw the need to. But now seeing my work in print–even in this informal copy–changes my outlook on the play and on myself. It compares to when I was introduced to someone in the neighborhood and she said “I know your name, you’re the writer.”
If I can get this far I can go further. It may be with the current play, it may be with something else that I choose to write, or publish, or produce. I’ve got lots of time ahead of me, and a keyboard that calls to me.
And this time around, I may use the printer, too!
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The apartment was on the third floor of a Rogers Park six-flat, on Farwell Avenue east of Sheridan Road. My family lived there in the 1960s, wedged between a small orthodox shul to the west and a foreboding-looking nursing home to our east.
My bedroom was at the front of the apartment. French Doors opened onto a small balcony, the perfect site for calling out to friends waiting below or for launching snowballs at slowly moving cars after the Blizzard of ’67.
My narrow room was barely wide enough for a single bed and my bookcase. A Chicago White Sox poster and a near-life-sized rendering of Alfred E. Neuman adorned the walls.
It was my wooden bookcase that I remember most fondly. I don’t know where my parents found it and I doubt that it was new when they made the purchase. Always economical, even their own bedroom set was purchased via the “Used Furniture” section of the Sun-Times Classified Ads. Old or new, the bookcase contained almost all that I cherished.
The top of the bookcase, at a little over waist high, was covered with knickknacks–a coin bank, a gold-plated Empire State Building, a kippah from a cousin’s wedding. Cool, but the best stuff came on the shelves below.
Ninety percent of the top shelf was filled by my collection of the Tom Swift Jr. book series. While most other kids I knew were reading the Hardy Boys, I was getting my introduction to science through Tom and his buddy Bud Barclay. On each birthday my parents would add another volume of the hardback yellow-orange spined books to the shelf. Soon those contributions were outpacing the rate at which new books in the series were published. After 33 books the series and my collection came to a halt.
After the row of Swifties came shelves and shelves loaded down with over 100 books, predominantly paperbacks gathered throughout my childhood. I carefully curated them, filing each in alphabetical order, by author. There were Agatha Christie whodunits followed by Beverly Cleary books for kids. Arthur Conan Doyle had a place, as did a book of mathematical games written by Scientific American’s Martin Gardener. After Gardner came two volumes from German author Erich Kästner, courtesy of Uncle Herbert in Switzerland.
Ngaio Marsh’s Artists in Crime, a British mystery much too sophisticated for my youngish eyes, must have originated on my father’s reading table but found a permanent home among the “M’s”. John Tunis’s baseball sagas were well represented as well. And somehow I found space for a few joke books, along with biographies of Helen Keller and Thomas Edison.
The bottom shelf was for treasures. Oversized books of Greek mythology from my Aunt Paula and Uncle Poldi lay next to stacks of dog-eared, folded-in Mad Magazines. A shoebox held my 1964 Topps baseball cards, just a Dal Maxvill card #563 shy of a complete collector’s set.
In 1970 our family moved to another apartment, across the street on the south side of Farwell. As a classmate of mine put it, we were moving to a better neighborhood. I don’t remember why, but my bookcase and most of my beloved books didn’t make the half-a-block move with us.
I don’t have much of a bookcase anymore. I read loads of library books and indulge in way too many online articles, so there is no need for an old bookcase with sagging shelves. But I would love one more crack at the bookcase of my youth–and a final chance to find that Dal Maxvill collectible!
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Banning books. Burning books. Books pushing agendas. What about books that teach kids that it’s fun to read?
Growing up in the city, I always got such pleasure reaching for a favorite book. It was just as much fun as a game of fastpitch at the Field School schoolyard, or hoops at Leone Fieldhouse. And that passion outlived other time-passers. I don’t play baseball or basketball anymore, but I still love curling up with a good novel in the sunroom.
Plenty of the books I read in those formative years came from Scholastic Books. Our classroom teacher would distribute the company’s flyer to our classroom. I would pore over each book description, trying to make the best choice for the 3 or 4 books I would convince my parents to order for me. And I felt darn proud when the teacher told the class that I could choose anything I wanted, even though some books were a year or two above our grade level.
My penchant for mystery stories came early. I remember being in 2nd or 3rd grade hunting for clues in The Secret of Black Rock, The Dugout Canoe Mystery, and Emil and the Detectives. Those were but precursors to my discovery of Hercule Poirot, Miss Marple, and Sherlock Holmes. Highpockets and other books by the prolific author John R Tunis were my passageways to sports fiction.
There were kid-geared biographies, too. After one School Parent’s Night Book Fair, my folks surprised me with a biography of Helen Keller. It was paired with a Thomas Edison biography containing the story, probably apocryphal, of the young inventor being pulled onto a train by his ears.
When I was eight my Swiss uncle gave me the English translation of the German children’s book Lottie and Lisa by Erich Kästner. While the title may not seem familiar to you, I assure you that you crushed on either Hayley Mills or Lindsay Lohan in The Parent Trap, movies based on that Kastner story.
Not every book had a story to tell. I memorized volumes filled with jokes, riddles, and whimsical verses. The first poem I could ever recite?
The Thunder God went for a ride,
Upon his favorite filly.
"I'm Thor," he cried.
The horse replied,
"You forgot your thaddle, thilly."
Now ask me how much of The Wasteland from my college English Lit of the 20th Century course I can remember…
Yes, I understand that early reading needs to be inclusive and non-stereotypical. But please, please, please let it be fun. What is more effective than instilling the joy of reading to produce a loving, caring, open-minded person and citizen?
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