It's Not the Years, It's the Miles

I was standing in line with my daughter, checking out today. I had given in, possibly foolishly, and bought her a new book. I say foolishly for two reasons, a) I have this book on my kindle, but am disinclined to hand over my ipad after seeing how she treats her own electronics and b) she has a lot of studying to do and I know that book will sing its siren call to her. But, whether it is foolish or not, I bought her the book. She told afterward that a good friend had read the same book recently and an adult was shocked that someone their age would want to read said book, because they couldn't possibly understand it at their age. Katie asked me, knowing I had already read this book, whether or not this was true. I answered as truthfully as I could:

Read this book now, and you'll enjoy it, and you'll get a lot out of it. Read it again in ten years, and you'll get a lot more out of it.

I find this to be true over and over in my own life. Rereading the books of my childhood is a great pleasure, because it's getting to know an old friend all over again, and finding out new and fascinating things they had never revealed to you before. Reading books means bringing in your own life experiences, and the older I get, the more experiences I can bring to the table.

My brother is fond of saying that I was born an old lady, and have learned to embrace childhood as an adult. He's probably right. I was too busy learning Algebra at six to have much time left for making childhood memories. My parents did what they thought was right for me, and they embraced the old lady they'd been given, never realizing the value in the rites of childhood and all the life experiences they bring to the party going on in the brain. But the memories I do have of doing foolish children's activities are some of my best memories ever. Books were my window to the wider world, and inspired some of my best adventures.

After reading Huckleberry Finn, a friend and I once built a raft and floated it down part of the Cahaba River. Wish I'd remembered I couldn't swim before we pushed off from shore. But I lived through it. I started my own Pickwick Portfolio after reading Jo's adventures in Little Women. Encyclopedia Brown taught me that there wasn't a mystery that I couldn't solve with a little ingenuity and some dusting powder. Too bad the powder from my mom's make-up drawer wasn't such a good substitute. I ran away from home once with clothes tied to a stick. Yeah, that was pretty stupid. It might have been related to the dusting powder incident, come to think of it.

Yet, all of those misadventures contributed to the person I am today. So did the less planned adventures: friends who died, my first drinking binge, my first disastrous relationship, moving thirteen times in sixteen years, parties on the lake and smoking in a friend's basement, getting married, falling in love and falling out of love, having children, manning up and fixing my own problems, and a whole lot of sobbing in between.

So, I revisit a favorite childhood book, and all of the baggage, all that messy crap, it comes with me and crawls back into the pages of the story with me. I see more of the characters, and I understand them a little better. Sometimes I think now, "god you're such an idiot, don't be nice, just chop his freaking head off!" Altruistic acts often seem a lot less romantic to me these days, because they seem to come back to bite more than just storybook characters in the butt.

I can't say it's because I'm crawling through the fourth decade of my life that I have these experiences - I learned some pretty difficult lessons pretty early on. And I don't think much of chronological age these days - I can have a great conversation with my teenage daughter, or my septuagenarian friend. Sometimes what we have in common is an experience, and sometimes that's what we admire about one another.

I encourage my kids to read what they can, whenever they can (well, as long as they keep up their school work). Get what they can from the books now, plan to visit again later. But keep their eyes open for the real experiences happening outside the pages of a book as well. It's the miles we put on that really make the stories worthwhile.