My passport to astonishing adventures, world travel, amazing people, history, and access to human knowledge began with the most exciting book I ever read: Fun with Dick and Jane. Sitting on my wooden seat in second grade, my lips moving as I sound out the letters, I suddenly recognize the words Spot, Jane, Mother. I have “cracked the code!” Now, like a voyeur, I can peek into another world, where Dick and Jane live with their mother and father and baby sister Sally. Father wore a suit and worked in an office. At home he mowed the lawn and washed the car. Mother, always attired in a dress, pushed a vacuum and made meals for the children who were so well behaved. Dick was always running around their tidy yard with the white picket fence chasing Spot while Jane, looking pretty and carefree, helped take care of baby sister Sally.
Just like cross cultural travel, this peek into another world opens a new awareness of my own home; piles of dirty laundry overflowing their baskets by the washing machine, my German Shepard dogs, Betsy and Rufus, running after my two brothers who are tearing around the house, wearing their fake coonskin Davy Crockett hats, tackling each other and causing general mayhem. Muffled sounds from the TV could be heard as it came through the closed bedroom door where my father sequesters himself. Unlike Mother (who never seems to have a name), my real mother works in an office and comes home exhausted to face a sink of dirty breakfast dishes, oatmeal turned to cement and dog poop on the living room rug.
Although I didn’t know it at the time a shame creeps into my spirit that “other families” are better than mine. Does Jane buy her clothes at the rummage sales at the Methodist Church? Does she notice her mother worrying that the car will run out of gas on the way to the grocery store? Why didn’t my father wear a suit and go to the office? Why didn’t Dick and Jane’s Mother or Father ever get angry or throw a shoe at Spot the dog for chewing their slippers? In some ways reading about Jane invoked the same feeling I had of cutting out my paper dolls, attaching their perfect clothes and making up a story of their lives in my mind.
This early look at an alternative reality was also a catalyst for my curiosity and a lifelong desire for learning. I yearned to consult with the Bobbsey Twins, Bert and Nan, to help me find the clues and solve the mystery of what was normal.
I looked more closely at my friends’ homes to gather data. My friend Linda lived on a farm and did not have indoor plumbing. It seemed perfectly normal to walk over a mile to her house alone and use the outhouse when I needed to pee. Her yard did not have a picket fence and was littered with old farm equipment and at least four mongrelly dogs that greeted me fondly when I arrived. Her mother, wearing a worn pair of men’s Levis from the Sears Catalogue could be found chopping wood or making hot chocolate for us over the wood stove. There was a happy feeling at her house.
Danny, who lived down the road from me seemed to fit my new definition of normal. His white ranch house was tidy, the grass always mowed, with a shiny new Ford sedan in the paved driveway. At Halloween his family always gave out full size candy bars. However, when I found him crying behind the shed, I discovered his father and mother were getting divorced.
This cognitive dissonance helped dissipate some of the feeling of inadequacy but reverberated in unexpected ways over the years- was I smart enough to do well in college? Was it OK to invite friends over to my house or would they judge me? Was it Ok to read aloud my stories for others to hear since they would obviously recognize I was not a good writer?
Eventually I learned there is no such thing as “normal.”
Over the years my curiosity intensified to absorb as much as possible about alternative realities through reading, traveling and currently with long discussions with Trump supporters. Like Hermione Granger, I always reach for a book if I want to learn something or just escape into another world. Usually, I am reading at least 4 or 5 books at one time, skipping from one to another based on my mood. I travel to Africa with missionary Nathan Price and his family in the Poison Wood Bible or land in 2055 (Sound of Thunder) with Ray Bradbury, to enjoy a new tourist offering- time travel back to an earth just forming and teaming with new life. Here I discover that a small, unthinking action of killing a butterfly can reverberate in unexpected ways as the impact cascades across the ages.
The thousands of stories that live in me take their breath from the amazing authors who are brave enough to share their gifts, not knowing how their words become part of our marrow and shape our collective future.
