Word Hungry

I was raised by a pack of readers. Literally. And as any voracious reader knows, the best time to read is while you...eat.

Growing up we had piles of varying types of literature in our kitchen, ranging from gardening books to random pre-teen dramas, like Starring Sally J. Freedman as Herself. (Actually, according to one of my childhood friends, this book was the Celine Dion to the Vegas of our kitchen table; it had a running showing of over 8 years.) All of it was there so that at any given time, one could just pick up a book, open it to anywhere, and commence reading. The subject (or audience) didn't matter...it was the reading that mattered.

Because of this multi-tasking at mealtimes, it could take me anywhere near an hour to finish my food. If other people were eating as well, they would also be reading and quietly chewing--it was the best of everything: food and words and silence! Naturally as this was how life was in our house, I thought that this was normal. It was sometimes difficult to eat at someone else's house without anything to read--it was like eating naked! What was I supposed to do, sit and TALK? I had food in my mouth!!

It is for this reason that if you open up one of the billions of books that travel between the members of my extended family's homes, you can often find a page with a smashed crumb or faint orange-cheesey fingerprint on one of the pages. They are the "A Reader-Eater Was Here" cave paintings in our history. Sometimes you can even use the edible detritus to determine who the last person was to read that particular book: anything chocolate=my sister; a dried, sticky drip of apple butter=my Gran.

As I got older and started living with other, non-reader-eaters, I realized that this isn't really the mealtime norm, per se. (Actually I came to realize that a good many things that occurred around our house weren't the norm...but that is another post altogether.) I adapted to eating and watching tv (college), eating and web-surfing (jobs), and eating and feeding (kids), but my preference is still, and will always be, to settle down at the kitchen table with a book and a plate-full of delicious.

[Aside: I suspect that this incessant reading was either the solution to, or the cause of my nosiness. I cannot NOT read. I will read labels, toothpaste tubes, instructions, ingredients, anything I can spot with words on it. I have to know what it says. There may be SOMETHING THAT I DON'T KNOW! I cannot live in a world with unread signs. Dan, however, would be quite at home there.]

So you can imagine my surprise and joy when at breakfast this morning, Jack sat down to eat his toast at the table and asked me for a book.

"Which one?" I asked him (they are everywhere).
"Oh, I don't know. How about that Simpsons book?"

I gladly handed over Dan's Simpsons encyclopedia and had to take a picture as my little budding reader-eater followed in his Mom's (clearly superior) genetic footprints, leaving his toast crumbs as a testament of this, hopefully for his sister to find.