Reading

I wasn’t a very eager reader until I met Judy in third grade. The thing about Judy was that she wasn’t an eager reader either. We both bit our nails too. But she had the long black hair I envied, and the lovely voice. Her dad got us to stop biting our nails by challenging us to a competition. We both won. That’s a good kind of competition. Having won the battle about our nails, we challenged each other to read. Together we perused the school library. It wasn’t really very big or particularly well stocked. Eventually we found two copies of the same book: Sawdust in His Shoes by Eloise Jarvis McGraw. I liked it at once because it had a picture of a horse on the cover and seemed to be about the circus. We checked it out and took ourselves off to read.

We began only semi-seriously, teasing each other over the first page or so. Interrupting each other until that magical moment when we were both so hooked that to make an irrelevant comment was an offence. We were gripped, totally involved and absolutely unaware that the rest of the world – even each other – existed.

I adopted one of Joe’s (the main character in Sawdust in His Shoes) habits: looking at peoples’ shoes. I’ve often pondered Joe’s dictum that a lot can be discovered about a person from a good look at their shoes. Now as a writer I know it wasn’t really Joe’s observation, but something that McGraw had either noticed or which she may have overheard. Most probably it was her own voice speaking. Now I watch the high heels that slop on feet, the number of seemingly very tired feet. I watch some with strangely placed heels that seem to make walking very awkward and I wonder if the wearers notice that their shoes hurt. I wonder about young people wearing boots that have the sole separating from the vamp: do their parents notice, don’t their feet get wet, does it make them sick, do they miss a lot of school? Sometimes I look at my own shoes and wonder what they tell others about me.

Reading the whole book took a lot longer than I anticipated, but I certainly didn’t want to put it down. I lived and breathed Joe’s world from the cabbage smelling orphanage he was sent to, to that leap he made onto the lovely horse’s back. I shared the chilling moments when he saw a pair of shoes he recognized from the orphanage but himself passed unrecognized as an escapee by the orphanage director. The family that took him in were so kind I wept on Joe’s behalf when they gave him the horse so he could begin training again. And when he finally rejoined the circus I breathed a satisfied sigh of relief. From there I turned back to the beginning and immediately started to read the book again. That meant I checked it out a second and even a third time before I dared part with Joe.

From that book an insatiable desire to become a rosinback rider in a circus was born. Not having a horse was a major problem to seeing this dream, and by the time I did have a horse I realized that my monocular vision would rule out trick riding… not to mention that there was no mechanic (special apparatus used to prevent a rosinback rider from falling while training) to help me learn. For years I devoured horse books and circus books, went to horse movies and circus movies. I graduated to other things. But I am still a voracious reader. Once started, I really don’t want to put a book down until I reach the end. It is really quite hard now to imagine that there was once a time when I didn’t want to read.