A bookshelf in our home. A place of light and air.

Recommended Listening, Follow, by Richie Havens

And maybe you can sing to me the words I just told you,

If all the things you feel ain’t what they seem.

And don’t mind me ‘cos I ain’t nothin’ but a dream.

I have collected scores upon scores of books for Bro, though there are a choice few he has gravitated to time and time again.  Some I welcome each time we sit down. Others, admittedly, have made me wince. 

For instance, I have no idea how Thomas the Tank Engine and the Big, Big Bridge even got into our collection, but it was a big, big favorite until I hid it, or should I say, “I guess we lost it little dude.”  Justin was growing weary of Goodnight Moon before he wedged it, I mean, it got stuck irretrievably behind a big, big impenetrable shelf. 

Other than these few regrettable incidences, I have tried to offer Brody freedom in the books he chooses.  He is only two, and though freedom at this age is more conservatively defined, I believe it still has the opportunity of leading to great things.

My dad offered this freedom to me daily at the library, and I can still remember the day I came home with what is perhaps my favorite book of all time, On Beyond Zebra, by Dr. Seuss.  In this genius little tome, Seuss invites his reader to discover a world beyond the alphabet.  I can still remember how powerful the suggestion was that we could imagine more than what was so narrowly defined for us.

My favorite books as a child almost always revolved around the more.  I loved, loved, loved Winnie the Pooh.  There were no lessons to be taught in the 100 Akre Wood.  What existed was a place where the unconventional was, though civilized, blissfully dominant.  We read Winnie the Pooh through the year, yet I cannot think of it without thinking of spring, and that smell of wet leaves mingled with the awkward and glorious smell of early spring flowers.  It was everything new, and nothing grim and mundane.

Milne, like Seuss, spared his reader the necessity of learning how to be an adult, while also not laboring too much over the notion of childhood.  You could, within the pages, free yourself from thoughts of you, and escape into possibility.

In honor of the spark these books and countless others have fostered within me, I have filled Bro’s shelves with books blissfully free of shoulds, and should nots.   I spend his day telling him what he should and should not be doing, and we are both tired of this by bedtime. 

My wish is that Bro will find, in these simple stories, the hope that life is so much more than how to hold a spoon and when to leave the table.   I found this hope within literature, but if I can just offer it to him, perhaps he will be able to find it wherever life takes him.

I can still remember where I was sitting when I first picked up To Kill a Mockingbird, or the first moment I realized I could understand Shakespeare on my own.  I was free within the words.  I was as real and independent as Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre: "I am no bird; and no net ensnares me; I am a free human being with an independent will.”

I have a shelf in Bro’s room where I have placed books precious to Justin and I; books from our past, our material Wonderland.  The shelf is strategically too high for Bro to reach, but it exists with the potential to be discovered.  On it are my copies of Winnie the Pooh and The Wind in the Willows nestled beside Justin’s Charlotte’s Web and Stuart Little.  However, I did not stop there.  I placed my tattered copy of A Midsummer Night’s Dream next to Kenneth Grahame, and this next to my much ruffled Dharma Bums.  Justin’s Sun Also Rises is also there, as well as his grandfather’s Odyssey.

It is a shelf of dreams and narratives.  A place of life and air. 

This morning Brody pointed to what for so long has been strange markings, and said “Brody.”  Excited, I hugged him and told him, as I do everyday, that this is a word, and that once he knows enough of these, experience will be limitless.  Today he discovered that a word can stand for something.  Many tomorrows from now he will perhaps understand that he can stand for himself.