Mother and child are learning to read at the same time, each receiving what they need from story. My mother learned to be a deep reader as she wrestled with Don Quijote de la Mancha — the first book she read in her master’s program. That year, I was the deep listener — still and quiet, coloring at the kitchen table in hues from my palette wishlist – a placemat from the restaurant she always took me to on our weekly downtown excursions. Coloring to the rhythm of my mother reading in her first language — the Spanish she will never forget even as she forgets English decades later.
Dinner was a time of day that pivoted on a cookbook holder — two stems to hold the book and free my mother’s hands for chopping and stirring. The cookbook holder could barely hold the 1000-page novel and Don Quijote’s fantasies; a novel that blessedly kept the truth at bay. My mother is Don Quijote, and I am the dogged companion, Sancho Panzo. She read in Spanish and translated into English – both times for me.
I witnessed my mother’s distress contending with a library in flames — Don Quijote’s precious volumes in ashes, sifting through our fingers. When we finish Cervantes’ thick, solid block of a book the cookbook holder will come to rest on a heap of unpaid bills and newspaper circulars in the cluttered future. Somewhere in that heap, my mother’s mind is splayed over the random hazardous piles about to choke us.
My crayons and placemat float above those piles. Zero gravity. That would have further ignited Don Quijote, who imagined he could pierce the sky. He and Rocinante, his weary horse, would be released to the heavens. Stick figures, no longer in danger of snapping in two. Geography slips away, and there is nothing but airless darkness. Yet Don Quijote and the others can freely breathe, happily, disoriented. Bravery in floating away freelance —the thing one fears most is successfully wrestled with.
In the end, yellow-papered piles disintegrate to the touch, toppling again and again until Don Quijote the novel is unburied. Its pages are torn at the corners, succumbing to a gravity that will never crush dreams and fantasies.
