Meditations. Reading Out Loud to People

Singing Madonna and Child Brian Kershisnik 2007

It will make your hours pleasant to you as long as you live.
Trollope

I like to read to people.
I must have read to the little sisters; certainly every babysitter, as the end of the rope draws near, has taken a stack of books and begun reading aloud, thinking grimly that this can be made to last till the blasted parents arrive. I am the oldest. I must have read to my sisters.
But I don't remember.

I remember cold readings. Auditioning with lines you've never read is in every way the antithesis of reading out loud to people except for the bare fact that you are reading out loud to people. Cold in every sense. No joint movement through a story, no shared laughter or gasps, no mild amused understanding at stumbles, no companionable impatience to return to the story once interrupted. No companionship of any kind. Just you, alone, with some unknown other who watches through narrowed eyes and wants--what? A mystery. I always at least explain what I'm looking for at auditions. But I do sometimes make people read cold.

I remember reading to Brian.
As a child Brian traveled the world. I lived in a tiny town and read during at least fifty per cent of my waking life. This made us similar in important ways, except that I hadn't been anywhere and he hadn't read anything. He decided he would travel me about. I decided to read to him in the car.
We began with Dickens. That way you only have to pack one book. No matter how long the drive.
Now he listens to books on tape. I had a prejudice against them, but Jim Dale bowled me over.

I read to my oldest baby for hours and through stacks and stacks of books. He never, ever got tired of it. I did. I didn't read to my next child like that. Was that because she didn't like it? She wanted to watch movies. The Magic Flute. Much Ado About Nothing. Sarah Plain and Tall. Over and over. But not the reading, the snuggling and page turning. She jumped up and ran away and I became afraid I had lost the access to her imagination to too much housework, too much cooking, too much busyness, too much of too much else. That the golden door somehow closed before she had sufficiently glimpsed the wondrous garden beyond. That she would never sink into a story, losing her other, real world moorings without a thought, without a backward glance. That books would be lost to her and that it would be my fault, my murderous carelessness. Or was she just not that into it?

I carefully read a great deal to my youngest. Who liked it well enough.
Maybe the firstborn had been lonely. Looking for a more populated world.

Our best readings are at bedtime. For years, every night. Whether their father understood or not. First to the youngest, most inclined to early sleep, then to the older one or ones till everyone was unconscious, including their father the painter. He thinks his job is to occasionally stroll through the reading asking questions to catch himself up on the plot till he finally gets in bed and goes to sleep, but he is wrong about this. That is not a job, it is a moral offense. His real job is to be awakened after the last chapter is over and walk everyone to bed. The oldest child, once roused a bit, will take himself off to bed, but the other two have to be moved one at a time. They are deep sleepers and perfectly capable of getting halfway to their rooms and then snoozing indefinitely against a wall for, well, I don't know for how long. We never left them there.

I have been writing this with a sigh. That paragraph should all have been written in the past tense. That is not how it is, that is how it was. In the flow of my real life, not the resting of ideal memory, my oldest is too far away to read to and moving too fast to listen long enough. He stopped listening to books the summer before his junior year in high school. He felt it coming, felt his new driver's license and the equally new curfew it wrought warring with our bedtime reading. He struggled sometimes for the sake of appearance, sometimes in reality, for a long time before he actually, finally stopped coming in to listen, wrestling with wanting to sacrifice the time, make it home before I turned my lamp off. He couldn't walk away in cold blood from the last book, but that one took a long, long time to finish. I think he worried about hurting me. I remember realizing it would be the last book with him, as he, firstborn, led the way into the first of the last of many things.

My next child is not as easy to touch, to talk with about feelings and dilemmas, to read to. I read to the youngest her own books first so she could fall asleep, then to each of the others in ascending order of age. But this middle child always contested with her younger sister who should be the first of the three asleep. She protested that she liked to listen but couldn't stay awake (couldn't be bothered?) even for the fairly stiff suspense tales I eventually used to try to get attention. After eighth grade she just wasn't hearing me anymore. It made me a little sick. I didn't really know how to mourn this, this apparent rejection of the most personal gift I ever offered her. I blamed myself all over again for failing, for getting distracted at the crucial juncture, and by what? By stupid life. Then one day without warning her teenage self just began reading. For fun. In a used book store in York I realized she was weighing books and comparing sizes, knowing whatever she bought she would carry on her back for the next two weeks; juggling prices to get as many books as possible even though her precious spending money was running out and there were still clothes to be purchased. I see my fingerprints all over her taste in books. She wants to talk. She likes and dislikes, she defends opinions. Now that she reads alone, we share the books together. Her read-to-me-always older brother almost never reads for pleasure, though he dearly loves a good book on tape or a good storyteller. So I am confused, but not so lonely.

Now I only read to my youngest. And I can feel that slipping slowly away as she reads more to herself; as she reaches out beyond our house to the world of peers, girlfriends and boys; as my life keeps me away too late and I find her asleep in my bed where she's been waiting. That happened when she was young, of course, waiting for a mom who was just going to move the laundry one last time, it happened with all the children, but you don't feel it so much when they are younger. They fall asleep all over the place, sweaty on you in church, draped oddly in shopping carts, mushed up against backseat windows of cars. When children are little bedtimes stretch out to and past the most distant horizon. Rather than hoarding them you just hope you can bear up under them. You certainly wouldn't count one missed bedtime reading as irreplaceably precious, lost from a finite and dwindling number.

We read demanding stuff and fluff. Right now we are deep in a love story. I have noticed the love story's growing popularity with the bedtime audience. Cyrano was a huge hit. Now we are reading Freckles. I practice reading with a straight face and utter conviction, good for my acting skills that lie dormant and grow rusty. I am as much an eleven year old girl as I ever was and we are an unabashedly romantic people. I recently read a mother's meditations on her twelve year old son, marveling, now that she knows one as well as she knows him, that she ever believed, when she herself was twelve, that her male cohorts could feel as romantic and misty as she could. To be exact, she could scarcely believe that she ever really expected meaningful Valentines from a twelve year old boy. Hmm. Well, I was a girl who seriously hoped for those marks, those signs, of dawning, meaningful interest. Maybe not from twelve year old boys, exactly. But from some boy, some day. Fourteen years old, or perhaps even sixteen. A boy like the ones I had met in books. OK, only in books, but, still. My little girl, much like the girl I was, was very sad this year that her class Valentine party was canceled because the day fell on a Sunday marooned in the President's Day weekend. She knew it would be her last Valentine's Day party till--well, till it would matter too much, in a different way. I realize I am actually trying to help. I am teaching her how to find boys in books. And illustrating, shamelessly, the sort of boy she should try to find.

Burning Book Brian Kershisnik 2007

I have this unimpressive paperback copy of To Kill a Mockingbird. The very first time I read that story, and the hundred or so times after, I read that particular copy. I read it to Brian in the car in the first year of our marriage. At bedtime I read that copy to each of our children in their turn. From the words in that book, the marks on those pages, we discussed. That talking made the book precious. As precious as reading made it. All those first times, all the wondering and sorrowing and asking and deeply felt contentment are soaked into the pages of that particular copy. Not just that it has been read, but that it has been read aloud. If my house burned down and just our stuff was lost and someone said, "well, it's just stuff," I would still cry forever for that copy of To Kill a Mockingbird. It's not just reading a book, it's the moment when you close the book, then close your eyes to try to realize what's just happened to you, then open them to look for the person to hand the book to, who can get where you've been as fast as possible so the two of you can talk. Sometimes, for a miracle, it's read out loud, so the two of you arrive together; so you can turn to each other, breathe, smile or frown and say...well, whatever you have to say. That's the point. Whatever you have to say.

My best friend is a person who will give me a book I have not read.
Abraham Lincoln

I'm probably reading. Just bring a book you want to read together and we'll talk.
Then we'll sleep.

Asleep at a Party Brian Kershisnik 2008