Dorothy Richmond is founder of the Dear Neighbor column and a longtime resident of Cedar-Isles-Dean.
Dear Neighbor,
January was a rough month for Minneapolitans, and I hope you are safe and showing love to your neighbors near and far. Love comes in all shapes and sizes. This month, let’s talk about the love of reading.
Reading for pleasure has taken a hard hit in recent decades. Proof of this decline, and the seed for this column, came to me last year on December 7 in the New York Times Sunday Style Magazine.
The story featured the cloistered elegance of a penthouse in Milan. I usually love looking at swanky houses in magazines, the house porn my friend Sanja jokes about, but this one felt lifeless. The rooms were predictably ritzy and outfitted with furniture that cost more than most cars. Then came the library. Technically one could call it a library because it had shelves, but those poor shelves, starving for books, held only vases and knickknacks. Not one book. On the coffee table sat a few glossy picture books, the kind that announce “I am worldly.” If a picture is worth a thousand words, shouldn’t a library offer at least that many? I was aghast.
When I was a junior in college, my then boyfriend visited my room for the first time. He immediately sat on the floor in front of my bookcases. I asked what he was doing. Still scanning the titles, he said, “You can tell a lot about people by their books.” I fell in puppy love on the spot. I cannot remember his name, but I have never forgotten his words. It is true. Our books reveal our interests, tastes, inspirations and thoughts. They remind us how we became who we are.
Love of reading is love of learning, the outgrowth of curiosity.
A few years ago I hosted a large family gathering. Three kids were there, ages 4, 6 and 9. I had never met the 9-year-old before because he was the grandson of a far-flung relative. The adults were holding court in the living room, so I took the bored kids to the basement where we still had toys from earlier days. The 4-year-old went for the trains. The 6-year-old dove into Lily’s American Girl dolls. And the 9-year-old looked adrift.
Trying to draw him out, I asked what he liked to read. He replied, “I don’t read,” in the same firm tone someone uses when refusing a cigarette. He preferred video games. I felt a wave of sadness.
Why should people read? There are many reasons. It makes you smarter, hones your focus and is free through the library. It relaxes and entertains. But the main reason is that reading teaches more than facts or information. It gives you an understanding of others, yourself and the world.
This boy became my mission for the evening. I was not going to make him read a book, but I told him this was a social occasion and his tablet was not invited. “Join us in conversation.” And he did, reluctantly at first, then laughing and visiting like the others. My daughter’s first grade teacher got me thinking about reading as a quality of life issue again. I approached him with all the earnest bluster of a first time, first grade mom, wanting reassurance that she was getting solid math, social studies, music and language arts instruction.
He said he covered all the basics, but focused on reading. “If a student cannot read by the end of first grade and is not reading for pleasure by third grade, he or she is lost.” Lost. Reading grants access to nearly everything life offers. It is the lynchpin of learning.
When I turned 8, my godmother sent me a copy of E.B. White’s “Charlotte’s Web.” I read it in a little nest I built in the living room under a window between the piano and a bookcase. It was the best book I had ever read and the first one that made me cry. Charlotte’s words about friendship moved me deeply.
I was in 4-H, so that August I entered my pig, a gilt named Lucy, in the Dakota County Fair. Before showtime, I gave her a buttermilk bath, just as Mrs. Zuckerman had given Wilbur to make him radiant. Lucy won a blue ribbon.
Many books later I met “Catcher in the Rye,” which shaped my adolescent mind. In my early 20s I discovered H.L. Mencken for his wit and eloquence, then Tolstoy for his morality, then a host of writers who now live, with my gratitude, in my library.
What books are you grateful for?
— Dorothy
