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Nathan Pyle / BuzzFeed
When I was 8 years old, my mother and I left our home in inner-city Boston and moved to a rural town in the middle of Northern Massachusetts. I was a city kid who had grown up in a rough neighborhood, used to seeing blood on sidewalks, not fields that stretched for miles. My father did not come with us. I missed him the way you miss something you don't know is missing, which is to say I didn't know why he was gone. I could feel the trouble but I couldn't put words to it. My mother worked and slept and cried and I was left to myself, using my imagination to fill up the great space that now surrounded us. I don't know if I spoke to my father of my loneliness, but I will never forget the first package he sent me. It felt odd to get mail from him, when he used to sleep in the room right next to mine, which was the room he still slept in — I was the one who had moved miles and towns and worlds away. If the package contained a note I do not remember it. All I remember is holding the cassette. On its label, in my father's handwriting: "Book One of The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring." Below that was simply: "The Beginning." I had an old tape recorder and a pair of hastily repaired headphones and that year my father read the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy to me, despite the fact that he was nowhere close to me at all.
Nathan Pyle / BuzzFeed
Eventually, my father moved back in with us — joining us in our rural life, where we used a wood stove to heat our drafty house and placed warm bricks in our beds. Still, my mother didn't stop crying. Our once empty-feeling place was now loud with my parent's yelling, as they did their best to patch their lives back together. I spent lots of time going exploring on my bike, no longer forced to stay within eyeshot of my house, as I had been in Boston. In the center of town I became friends with an old man whose one leg was shorter than the other. He was a retired minister who played piano and lived in a house overflowing with books. I'm not sure why he pegged me as someone who would enjoy Stephen King. Maybe it was because he could tell I was having a hard time at home. Maybe it was because he'd seen me sneak behind the town hall to smoke cigarettes. Maybe it's because it's impossible to be young and not love Stephen King. Either way, he said, "I think you'll like this," as he handed me The Stand. I devoured it immediately. There's no escape from reality like being terrified of something imaginary. When I brought The Stand back next week, the minister took every Stephen King book he had and piled them into a giant cardboard box, which I tied to my bike before riding home, careful not to lose my balance.
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