Books

I do not know where they came from.  My parents may have bought them for me, or maybe my grandparents.  They could have been from my mother's teaching materials.  Perhaps they passed through the hands of one or more of my uncles before reaching me.  They were my first books.  They comprised a series of biographies of prominent Americans.  Not the George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln-type pantheon; these books were on Robert Fulton and the steam engine, Eli Whitney and the cotton gin, great figures of American industrialization.  And they were awesome!
In very short order, Fulton's engine powered the riverboats that led to Mark Twain, who led to The West and everything that was smart funny.  Whitney's gin led to the world that cotton made: The South, plantations, the abomination of slavery, Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, The Harlem Renaissance, Jazz, lynching, Brown v. Board of Education, Thurgood Marshall and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who was murdered in my hometown right in the middle of my childhood, and all of this reading, all of these books.
I just never cared about Kidnapped or Treasure Island.  The real world was always more interesting, scarier, more thrilling and more heartbreaking than things that anyone made up.
I have never asked them, but I have often wondered why my parents let me run.  I cannot describe my good fortune in having those two wonderful people at home who, no matter what they may have thought or felt out of my hearing, never made me feel weird for reading all the time, or reading what I wanted to read all the time.  I don't know how many first-graders were reading Strength to Love, and I certainly didn't get all those words, but what words they were!  And still are.  Anyway, when Mrs. Willis, first grade at Idlewild Elementary, objected to my reading during spelling tests, I never got in trouble at home.
As I am basically ignorant of the language of architecture, I don't know the proper name for them, but we lived in those years in a house of the type you still find all over mid-town Memphis. The St. John's associate pastor's parsonage was on Harbert, east of McLean.  That meant two things: lots of nooks and crannies inside and out perfect for sitting and reading where little brother and baby sister weren't, and we were just a couple of blocks from the Memphis Public Library.  The new, Hooks Library is great, but it will never be my library.  Mine sat on Peabody at McLean.  It was a wonderful old building to me, its modern style notwithstanding, with the whole world inside it, in the pages of what seemed like its miles and miles of books.  The bike racks out front told me before I ever got inside that kids were welcomed there.  The Library was my Fortress of Solitude, even though it was always full of people.  I was fascinated at the feeding of the microfilm into the reader to reveal what had gone on before, seemingly to the beginning of time.  The card catalogue seemed like an enormous treasure box, because it was, surrendering the next golden nugget of a book that would become the next adventure or port of call or shoes to fill for just a little while.  I loved the way that the place smelled.  Books had that odor-a little bit musty, slightly damp, that smelled like knowledge. I just wanted to know all that stuff that was hidden in those books that I didn't know.  Yet.  I doubt that children ever smell that smell today, with acid-free paper and total climate control. It is a tragic loss of the sense of place.  A place of books.
I bought my first book in 1969.  Eastside Elementary, like schools all over America, got the Scholastic Books fliers, handed out in all the classes in case we wanted to place an order.  I did.  For a couple of bucks, I became the extremely proud possesser of a copy of Strange But True Baseball Stories For Boys by Atlanta's great sportswriter, the late Furman Bisher.  I can still remember turning it over in my hands, soaking in the weight and texture of my very own book.  To this day, I get a rush holding a new book.
I can remember the towns by the libraries.  Union City, Benton, Jackson, Covington, back to Memphis.  In each one, very helpful librarians seemed very happy at being asked where the history section was, or the baseball, or the politics.  Not so much, the work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson.  I was eleven during the 1972 presidential campaign.  I understood that Nixon was a bastard.  I was also very impressed with Senator George McGovern. I could not understand why stopping the war in Viet Nam would be a bad thing.  I still don't.  I could not understand why asking the wealthiest Americans to help a little more to provide for people in desperate need was a bad thing.  I still can't
But my political education came in two pieces in the almost two years from when Tricky Dick the Crook got re-elected until he resigned, disgraced: the Watergate Hearings, and Hunter Thompson's furious Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72.  Senator Sam Irvin's committee was fascinating. Thompson's book was mind-bending.  Thompson's access was shocking.  Did Nixon's people really talk like that? (Yes, and, if anything, he was worse!) Could McGovern really be that honest and decent? (Yes, and, if anything, better!)  For Thompson, politics was ultimate reality.  It was stranger than any drug trip.  It was more absurd than any joke.  The very fact that a man like Nixon could so resoundingly defeat a man like McGovern says everything that can ever be said about the intelligence of the average American voter.  Or lack thereof.  But Thompson's work, for all of its seeming cynicism, is a deeply idealistic book.  The searcher doesn't give up.  He just keeps looking, always believing that next time, the story will come out right. 
Almost like a motto for a reader...
To Be Continued.