Good News

I called B, to tell him that the Nature people would be in his backyard. He was as perplexed as me that they wanted to park at my place (which makes no sense). The good news was that he now had high-speed Internet at his house for $75 a month, and it worked wonderfully well and fast. I'm currently paying more than that for a system that doesn't function. I'll need to modify the way I work, but I can learn new tricks. Chet asked me how I had come to books and I gave a flip reply, but later I was thinking about that. Mom and Dad had both graduated high school, and there was a book case at the end of the hall, two shelves, three feet tall and four feet wide. My precious encyclopedia (American Heritage, as I remember) on the bottom shelf, a scattering of Reader's Digest, and a couple of other books. One of them was a non-fiction account of 84 or 42 days on a life-raft in the Pacific. I read that one about fifty times. Achieving a natural voice is a difficult thing. Simply telling stories. Dad was stationed in Norfork, Virginia, and there was a public pool in walking distance of our house and a public library between. The librarian told me to bring my Mom and an electric bill and she'd give me a card and explain the rules. After that I got my ten books a week on Saturday, when Sis and I went to the pool, got them on the way home (and stop for a coke at the bookie-joint soda fountain) and then, as now, I'd just read. I played baseball until high school, I debated, I was in school plays, gregarious and well-adjusted, but all the rest of the time I was reading. High school, I had some good teachers, one of them gave me my first collected Shakespeare and another gave me Whitman. I was coddled by English teachers and librarians because I read, then I ran into some serious readers, and I read more. Now, I pretty much read all the time, the actual world is so dreary.