Book Memories

I remember the first time I read The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. I was in middle school, and my best friend had gone away for the entire summer on a student exchange program. A middle school girl without her best friend is like peanut butter without jelly.  And while it certainly wasn’t the end of the world, it was close enough, with the summer months looming ahead, full of empty days and no one to hang out with.

My best friend’s parents took pity on me that summer and I spent as much time hanging out at their house as my own, moping around and complaining of nothing to do.  And I remember one particularly long, hot day I found myself in their basement searching through a box of tattered paperbacks with no hope of finding anything good.

I was at the time an avid fan of teen romances, the kind that featured on the cover blue-eyed girls with impossibly straight brown hair named Amber, when I found The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.  I had heard of it before. It was a “recommended” book; a guaranteed death knell for any book as a child can tell you.  But boredom was a powerful motivator, and that afternoon while my best friend was traveling in France, I, too, began my own travels in Narnia with Lucy, Edmund, Susan and Peter.  I was saved.

I have not read The Lion the Witch and The Wardrobe in a long while, so the details of the story are a little fuzzy, but I can tell you exactly how that book felt in my hand; yellowed paperback, broken spine. I can still recall the cool damp of the basement and the old scratchy brown and red quilt I laid on as I read my way through Narnia and the summer.

Book memories.  The first time you hear your favorite picture book read to you, and every time thereafter.  The moment you discover on your own Jack and Annie, Arthur, or spider named Charlotte.  The first adult novel you sneak and pass around in middle school.  The book that gets you through that hard time, or that lonely time; or the book you read at the exact right time, and wasn’t it remarkable how it said everything that you were thinking or feeling?

Book memories. Everyone has one. Tell me yours.  And if it is time to revisit some old friends, or possibly make some new memories, we’ll see you at the library.