The Incredible Shrinking Woman Set Free

(an anti-rant a.k.a a product endorsement)

I'm a fan of The Boss...GymBOSS, that is...GymBOSS miniMAX specifically...

Last July*, I ranted on this blog about my two-month battle to calibrate the pedometer function on the iPod I had gotten for my sixtieth birthday. Short synopsis of that post: iPod - great music player, rotten exercise accessory. This year I asked for a GymBOSS miniMAX for my birthday. My experience with this nifty little item has been so rewarding I just can't keep it to myself...

I've spent some time the past year re-evaluating my exercise regime. Work and writing seem to be taking up more of my week, making sufficient time for exercise increasingly difficult. The somewhat time consuming higher mileage walking that has been my exercise of choice for years was starting to wear on me as well. My body had decided that certain parts really don't want to go the distance anymore. Said body did not, however, seem to object to shorter, more frequent and more intense activity. HIIT (High Intensity Interval Training) and its trendy cousin, the Tabata workout, are all the rage right now as the way to go to maintain a high level of fitness with shorter workouts. Now, I don't pretend to do HIIT or Tabata in their pure form, but I believe there are many personalized variations possible, based on the idea that short spurts of intense activity, alternated with lower levels of activity, can make a time-wise, yet effective, daily workout.

I thought my ancient sport watch would do to time intervals as I walked or did step aerobics, but I was constantly looking at my watch and either over-shooting or under-shooting my time targets. Then my daughter told me about the GymBOSS she used on her runs to do interval training or in the house to do other interval workouts. I asked for one for my birthday. I opted for the slightly fancier model, the GymBOSS miniMAX, a pedometer-sized multi-interval timer. I could program multiple interval programs and adjust the beep to beep loud, soft, vibrate or any combination of the three for one to nine seconds. No more looking at my watch.

The morning I received my GymBOSS, I opened it up to find an instruction sheet similar to any found with a sport watch in the past twenty years – a tissue-thin page in five languages written in a miniscule font. Uh-uh... I braced myself for another months-long post-birthday present programing frustration. The GymBOSS looked like a pedometer, had low-tech buttons like a sports watch, and a multi-function scrollable screen, the kind that's ubiquitous in sports watch technology. I set to work. Within an hour, I had set the clock, figured out the stop watch, set some simple intervals and programmed and saved three – 3!!! - complex multiple interval workouts. Proud of myself, with the GymBOSS in my pocket, I headed out to the streets...

I had programmed a five minute warmup at the end of which I had set a sufficiently loud two second beep. I then ran for 30 seconds until the beep signaled the beginning of a lower intensity one minute brisk walk. These two intervals repeated ten times, ending with a five minute cool down. The little black and pink box worked perfectly! (I, less so...)

I've since used the GymBOSS a number of times, walk/running the other interval workouts I had set, as well as using it for short step interval workouts indoors. I like the way my mind is set free to wander and observe, not having to look at my watch or try to figure out how many intervals I have left – the beep tells me when to change pace, a quick look at the always visible screen lets me know how far along in the workout I am.

My experience with programming my iPod last year left me shrinking in recorded height in an attempt to get accurate mileage readings. My experience with programming my GymBOSS has only left me shrinking in weight as I increase the intensity of my workouts. Definitely a better shrinkage. I can even listen to the music on my iPod while I workout, setting the beep on my new favorite piece of old-school technology loud and long enough to be heard over the music. I can even hear the beep over the sound of Steve Jobs turning in his grave...

Life is short... running makes it seem longer." - Baron Hansen

*The Incredible Shrinking Woman Held Hostage, July 12, 2013

Storytelling from My Angle
(Part 2)


How I Tell My Story

So, I tell stories... How do I do it, approach the mechanics of writing the stories? I'm the type of person who likes to keep things simple. I've managed to condense my writing process down into four steps:

1) I just do it... (Nike knows what I need to be a writer.)

I believe if I am a writer, I need to write whether it's read or not. Writing is something that needs to come out of me before I can think about who is going to read it. Yes, many times I do purposefully write for an audience, imagining my ideal reader. But, for me, the writing process itself is often one of forthtelling – taking my thoughts and ideas and letting them come out of me and onto a page. Who reads it is secondary. I think some of the best writings are journals and memoirs, those stories that just had to come out and may not have come out with the primary purpose of being read as much as the purpose of being expressed. So I just write, and write, and write, not worrying too much about how it looks or how it will look, but just getting my thoughts and ideas into the printed word – just doing it. I try to write frequently, as time allows, sometimes setting writing goals. (This spring I committed to write something, anything – a few sentences, a few paragraphs – every day of Lent.)

2) I just do it...again...and again...and again... (Yep, Nike still knows how I need to write.)

I struggled with writing coherently in my freshman year of college until the professor teaching my composition class told me that if I rewrote everything at least three times I couldn't help but write well. Of course, in the pre-computer days, rewriting was a lot of work. I'm someone who is old enough to think erasable bond was a godsend, that switching balls on the IBM Selectric to change a font was amazing. Cutting, pasting, deleting, playing around with punctuation, fonts, italics – all are heaven for me now.   I confess that I've been waiting most of my writing life for a word processor, then a computer, and finally, a laptop. Once in possession of a laptop, I had exhausted all my excuses for not writing regularly and started writing in earnest. And rewriting...and rewriting...and rewriting. Eventually, the ideas that were initially put into words in rapid, haphazard fashion start to take on a coherence and form that's downright readable after the third rewrite.

3) When in doubt, I read...

Reading can be a great motivator for writing. I read a wide variety of printed media – novels, biographies, non-fiction, magazines, other blogs. The more I read, the more I want to write, as long as I don't let the really talented writers discourage me by comparison! Though I strive to have my own style, there are authors whose writing styles make me sit up and take notice. Since the writing I do in “The Angle” is non-fiction, there are three writers that have influenced this part of my writing. Donald Miller (Blue Like Jazz; A Million Miles in a Thousand Years; “Storyline” blog) has a way of weaving words and spiritual themes into thought-provoking, sometimes controversial, essays. I don't always agree with what he has to say, but I really love how he says it. Bill Bryson (A Walk in the Woods, A Short History of Nearly Everything, many travel books) writes well-researched books that are very informative in a style that varies from being mildly humorous to drive-off-the road hysterical. (I confess that humor is a valued commodity in our family. My son and my husband put a high value on being funny. I try to hold my own...) Lastly, “The Angle” wouldn't be “The Angle” (“...eclectic ramblings from faith to fishing...”) without the influence of John Gierach (Standing in a River Waving a Stick, Another Lousy Day in Paradise). He's described as an author and freelance writer, though having read most of his collections of essays, I'm convinced he is just another person addicted to fly fishing who is fortunate enough to write brilliantly about what he loves in a way that supports his habit. Since I don't ice fish, my winter fishing season consists of reading John's books.

4) I experiment. I try not to fear leaving my comfort zone.

I'm still discovering who I am in this writing process. I sometimes feel prompted to try things that don't come naturally to me or are not in my usual writing style. Last May, I challenged myself to do a seven consecutive day instructional series on square foot gardening. I just did a short series on dropping everything to read. I've done the occasional recipe and one (sort of) movie review. I've a document on my computer (where I'm writing this at the moment) entitled “Blog Closet Ongoing” that contains scraps of writings that will probably never make it onto “The Angle”. They are just exercises in flexing those parts of my writing muscles yet undeveloped. In A Million Miles in a Thousand Years, Donald Miller talks about his experience of writing a novel, how stories are only partly told by writers, that the characters have a tendency to do what they want, not necessarily obeying the writer. He said he would sit down at the keyboard, intending for a character to go to Kansas, only to find his character on a beach in Mexico, sipping a margarita. I was intrigued by that crazy concept of uncontrollable characters, so I started a novel as an exercise in a different type of writing. I doubt it will ever be seen by anyone other than myself, but 180 pages into it, I'm a better writer, I believe, for the exercise of chasing after a family of characters that surprise me with their story lines and cause me to wonder what they will do next. I don't work on the novel consistently, but I come back to it between other projects to exercise my fiction muscles, check to see what my characters are up to and write them back into some semblance of order.

* * *

So there it is, everything I've learned about writing up to this point in my writing life. I'm still very much a newbie, especially in regards to having others read what I have written. Writing “The Angle” still feels a little surreal at times, a very extroverted activity for this introvert. I always feel a little weird just after I've clicked the “publish” button, that scary excited feeling of risking-taking, with something deep inside of me saying “What have I just done?” And then I let it go, and go on to the next writing project. Excuse me now while I go back to writing my novel. One of my secondary characters has gone rogue again...

“You like to tell true stories, don't you?' he asked, and I answered, 'Yes, I like to tell stories that are true.'

Then he asked, 'After you have finished your true stories sometime, why don't you make up a story and the people to go with it?

Only then will you understand what happened and why.

It is those we live with and love and should know who elude us.”

― Norman Maclean, A River Runs Through It and Other Stories

Storytelling from My Angle

(Part 1)

One year ago today I started this blog. I realize what I've been doing with “The Angle” this past year doesn't make me a writer, but it has taught me a lot about writing, or at least, about my own writing style and what writing means to me.

I think I've always been a writer at heart, but for many years I was afraid I was one of those people who liked the idea of writing more than I liked writing. For me, it's always been about telling the story, having been an avid reader long before I thought much about writing. It's why I love to read great novels as well as good nonfiction. They both contain “true” stories, even if, as in the case of novels, they never really happened quite that way. I read a quote on writing many years ago that went something like this - “If you want to tell the truth about something, make up a story about it.” I've been unable to track down who said it, but if J.R.R. Tolkien or C.S. Lewis did not say it, they clearly understood the concept. The Lord of the Rings' long-term popularity and faithful fans are a testament to timeless truths expressed by Tolkien in tales of a mythical Middle Earth. Lewis also wrote straight up non-fiction essays as well as brilliant fiction, both full of profound truths.

I have concluded from my years of reading and listening and seeing what is going on in the world around me that there is really only one Story out there to tell. It is an ancient massive Story of an all encompassing Truth, and every word of writing done since the beginning of time, both fiction and non-fiction, has been to support some part of that Story or explain it or or try to refute it or try to re-express it. And because we are all part of this massive Story, we are free to speak into it. As we write, with pen or computer or our lives, we just look around from our place in the Story and comment on it. And that's what I have attempted to do here, to take the stories of my life - true stories - and comment on them, muse about how I perceive their place in the big Story, and present it from my angle...

Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it. -C. S. Lewis

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing. -Benjamin Franklin

Tomorrow: How I Tell My Story

Spiritual Composting Revisited

I was planting spinach and pea seeds in the garden a week back, admiring the rich loam of the garden, the product of years of adding compost to the heavy clay soil. The ingredients of the compost were well broken down except for the occasional peach pit or a partially decomposed peanut shell that would be gone in another year. Running my hands through the soil, I unearthed an object I've come to think of as the Curse of the Black Pearl. (No, nothing to do with the first (and best) of the Pirates of the Caribbean movies...)

Composted Black Pearl teabags, three to five years old

Lipton introduced a specialty line of tea a number of years back, lauding the flavor and the high quality of their tea leaves. I tried one flavorful black tea sold under the name Black Pearl. I loved the tea, had coupons for the new product, and over the next months bought and drank a lot of it. Since I'd composted all my tea bags for years, I automatically tossed the used bags of the new tea into the container on the kitchen counter, the first stop on the way to the backyard composters. Lipton, for whatever reason, decided for this new line of tea to abandon their traditional paper fiber bag/biodegradable string/paper tag and replaced them with a nylon pyramid-like bag, a nylon string and a plastic tag. Years later, these tea bags, like virulent weeds, are still showing up in the soil of my garden - bag, with tea leaves still inside (!), string and tag as intact as they were the moment I pulled the bag out of my teacup. I have become resigned to the fact they will never decompose and will only disappear if I pick them out of the soil, one by one, and throw them into the trash.

A year ago* I wrote about spiritual composting, how God, over time, uses the debris of our lives, layered with His grace and mercy, tossed by His Spirit, to create a rich soil for our future growth. But what to do about the truly unusable, the “Black Pearl teabags”, that persist in our lives? We all know what it is to deal with sinful debris, the natural consequences of living in a fallen world. And God often does work in our lives through that debris. But there are things we find in our lives at times that need more drastic action, that feel more like SIN rather than just sin. Jesus words in this area are strong and direct and sound downright brutal:

If your right eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away. For it is better that you lose one of your members than that your whole body be thrown into hell. And if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away. For it is better that you lose one of your members than that your whole body go into hell. (Matthew 5:29-30, ESV)

Pretty strong stuff...

Looking at the same words in an idiomatic translation, things don't soften much:

Let’s not pretend this is easier than it really is. If you want to live a morally pure life, here’s what you have to do: You have to blind your right eye the moment you catch it in a lustful leer. You have to choose to live one-eyed or else be dumped on a moral trash pile. And you have to chop off your right hand the moment you notice it raised threateningly. Better a bloody stump than your entire being discarded for good in the dump. (Matthew 5:29-30, The Message)

Still pretty strong stuff - “Let's not pretend this is easier than it really is...” So let's not. For the sin in our life that is persistent, ugly and resistant to change, there is only one solution, not easy, but fortunately for us, blessedly simple. We have a Savior, One who went to the cross for both the sin and the SIN in our lives, (for aren't they both really SIN?), One who bought us freedom and forgiveness for all the stuck places in us. We can call out, cry out, to the God who saves, the only One who can show us how to pluck out and dig out the undecomposable stuff, more deadly than any bad teabag - the addictions, the lust, the anger, whatever – and lay them at the foot of His cross. And when we do, humbly acknowledging our helplessness in dealing with such things ourselves, we can experience a freedom that gives us new appreciation of the profound depth of meaning in the “Good” of Good Friday.

If the Spirit of God has given you a vision of what you are apart from the grace of God (and He only does it when His Spirit is at work), you know there is no criminal who is half so bad in actuality as you know yourself to be in possibility. 

                                           - From My Utmost for His Highest by Oswald Chambers, June 1

 

* April 26, 2013

D.E.A.R God

Saturday I wrote about Drop Everything And Read Day and reading to my kids. Yesterday, I shared a list of some of my favorite quirkier reads that I have dropped things to read. Today I'm going to share a list of books and authors that have grown my relationship with God and have fed me spiritually over the years, some of which continue to do so and are definitely worth dropping everything to read...

1.  The Bible

I actually hesitated putting this one on the list. It's really not a book, but THE Book, a book to dwarf all other books. What can you say about a read that is considered to be the best selling book of all time, recognized by many as being divinely authored, and tells THE Story to top all stories, or as some have said, “The Greatest Story Ever Told”? The book most worth dropping anything and everything for...

2.  Anything by Timothy Keller                                                                                                                                                                                        
Keller, the pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York City, writes smart, readable books on various areas of Christian thought. His Reason for God rivals C. S. Lewis' Mere Christianity as an intelligent presentation of what this Christian/God-thing is all about. Encounters with Jesus, also good, is Reason for God “lite”. Two other favorites of mine are Every Good Endeavor, his examination of work, and Prodigal God, a look at God's prodigious love for us.

3.  Anything by Donald Miller

I was given a copy of Miller's Blue Like Jazz a number of years ago, and reading it gave me a revival of the heart in my relationship with God. Miller's books are neither orthodox nor theological, and they often leave you with more questions than they answer, but they always leave me wanting more of God in my life, so I consider them worthwhile reads. His A Million Miles in A Thousand Years is another favorite of mine, an encouragement to tell a better story with our lives.

4.  Anything by C. S. Lewis

Non-fiction, fiction, Lewis is a master of both. His children's fiction classic, The Chronicles of Narnia, presents spiritual truths to readers of all ages. His Mere Christianity, The Screwtape Letters, and The Great Divorce are all masterpieces of Christian thought.

5.  A Praying Life, Paul E. Miller

The best book on prayer I've read. Paul Miller opens up his “prayer closet” and lets us have a peek inside to see how this persistent pray-er approaches a prayer relationship with God. Practical and inspirational simultaneously.

6.  The Practice of the Presence of God, Brother Lawrence

The compiled teachings of a simple 17th-century Carmelite monk, this book is a must read for anyone who wants more of God's presence in their lives. Brother Lawrence's relationship with God comes across in a wonderful, simple intimacy that leaves you wanting more of the same for yourself.

7.  My Utmost For His Highest, Oswald Chambers

My all-time favorite daily devotional. I've read through it at least 15 times in the past 30 years, and it never gets old. There is the original and the more modern English version. Both are good, though I personally like to wade through the slightly archaic language of the original, which really is not all that difficult to read.
 

8.  Trusting God in a Twisted World and Other Reflections On Asking God Why, Elisabeth Elliot

The title says it all. A collection of thoughtful essays from a godly woman who has gone through some very difficult things in her life. There's even an interestingly comforting piece for anyone who has grieved the loss of a pet.
 

9.  Celebration of Discipline, Richard Foster

 

Foster, a Christian Quaker theologian, examines the inner disciplines of prayer, fasting, meditation, and study in the Christian life. He also delves into the more lifestyle-like disciplines of simplicity, solitude, submission, and service, and the community-related disciplines of confession, worship, guidance, and celebration. A serious, but worthwhile read.

10.  Introverts in the Church, Adam McHugh

I identified with the title, so read the book. I found it both informative and comforting. This book is for the introvert who has ever felt that church is an extrovert's domain, but also for the extrovert who wants to understand that person who sits in the last row of the church and leaves early, or attends small group, but rarely talks.

* * *

There is always time in the day to drop something and pick up something to read. There is always a book that needs finishing...or starting...or has that amazing paragraph that needs rereading. Right now, THE Book is calling. I can jump into that one anywhere...

Reading ought to be an act of homage to the God of all truth. We open our hearts to words

that reflect the reality He has created or the greater Reality which He is. It is also an

act of humility and reverence toward other men who are the instruments by which

God communicated His truth to us. - Thomas Merton

D.E.A.R Me

Yesterday, in honor of Drop Everything And Read Day, I wrote about my experience of reading to my children as they were growing up. I admitted that my diligence in reading to them was somewhat selfishly fueled by my own love of books. I've always been an avid reader. I got my first library card in third grade and was awestruck by the concept I could take home and read shelves and shelves of books I didn't own as long as I brought them back in a timely manner. I'm still awestruck by this generosity of the public library system, I guess, in that my husband has to remind me periodically not to check out more books than I can carry to the car in a single trip. And don't even get me started on interlibrary loan! The thought I can request almost any book in existence and have it in my possession within a week or two leaves my giddy...

In recent years, I've started keeping a list of books I have read and their authors. I do this so if anyone should ask if I could recommend a good book, I would have a reasonable chance of remembering one, having the correct title and knowing who wrote it. I've got hundreds of books on the list. I just wished I had started the list sooner. In honor of the day after D.E.A.R. Day, I'm going to share ten of my quirkier favorite reads, books I've stumbled upon that other readers may not have yet discovered. Hopefully, I will give enough information for anyone out there to decide if these books are for them or not.

1.  The Plain Reader: Essays on Making a Simple Life, Scott Savage, Editor

Contributors to this collection include Quakers, Amish, refugees from highly materialistic lifestyles, homeschooling moms, writers that are not opposed to using laptops while they ride in their Amish horse-drawn buggies. This book has something for everyone who has ever wondered if maybe they are being called to a simpler way of life. One of my all time favorites, I found this book to be life-changing.

2.  The Wild Trees, Richard Preston

A book about the tallest trees in the Pacific Northwest and the people who climb them and sleep in them...for fun. Who would think that trees and the slightly nutty people who are obsessed with them would make for such a fascinating read?

3.  Down the Highway: The Life of Bob Dylan, Howard Sounes

One of the best biographies I've ever read. Bob Dylan, of course, supplies a lifetime of interesting biographical material, but the true charm of this book is that it is so well-written. Sounes researches well, attributes well, organizes well and produces a non-sensational portrait of a complex man who has been one of music's most prolific and ever-changing figures.

4.  The Eyre Affair, Jasper Fforde

A novel that defies description. The main character, Thursday Next, is a literary detective in a alternate reality set in present day England. She has the ability to “book jump” that puts her into classic novels, interacting with literary characters. You find out why Thornfield Hall really burns down in Jane Eyre, hear Fanny Dashwood fret over her unwarranted bad reputation in Sense and Sensibility. There is a series of novels with Thursday Next in them, all outrageous and cleverly written. Familiarity with classic literature is helpful to fully appreciate the craziness, like the anger intervention group for Heathcliff of Wuthering Heights. Fforde also has a detective series based on nursery rhymes -The Big Over Easy, The Fourth Bear - and one novel about a society based on color saturation - Shades of Grey (No, not that one...!) Fforde's writings consistently make me laugh out loud.

5.  Where'd You Go, Bernadette? Maria Semple

Another novel I found cleverly written and very entertaining. The story of a runaway architect mother, a Microsoft father, and a precocious 15 year-old daughter told through a series of emails, official documents, and random letters and notes. This book has everything -Ted Talks references, a cruise to Antarctica, out-sourced personal assistants. Funny and sharp, yet heart-warming at the same time.



6.  A River Runs Through It, Norman Maclean

A novella about the flyfishing sons of a Montana pastor. (Of course, there had to be a fishing story on this list!) Best literary capture of the art (Yes, art!) of flyfishing ever. And the writing is just beautiful, even if you don't like fishing. For an example of exquisite writing, read the first five pages and the last page. So good...and short enough for me to read every year.

7.  The Gun Seller, Hugh Laurie

A thriller detective novel written by the actor that played House, who is also an accomplished piano player and recording artist. A light, fun read if you like the genre.

8.  The Language God Talks: On Science and Religion, Herman Wouk

An interesting little non-fiction piece by the man who wrote Caine Mutiny, Winds of War, War and Remembrance, and many other excellent novels. Written as his passion piece when he was 94 years old, he uses his orthodox Jewish sensibilities to try to reconcile his understanding of God, science and the Holocaust. A thoughtful book from both a Jewish and scientific perspective.

9.  Sudden Sea: The Great Hurricane of 1938, R. A. Scotti

Before there was the Perfect Storm and Superstorm Sandy, there was the great hurricane of 1938, which changed the geography of Long Island and Rhode Island. This book tells the story of a devastating storm in the days before non-stop media coverage and hype of weather systems. The destruction from this massive unnamed hurricane was little known by the general public at the time, with most news outlets focused on Hitler and his activities in the Sudetenland that week. Gripping eye-witness accounts.

10.  Muriel Foster's Fishing Diary, Muriel Foster

Not really a reading book, but a flyfishing journal of a woman living in Scotland in the first half of the twentieth century. It contains hundreds of sketches and watercolors of fish, flies, and birds as well as Muriel's notes on her wildlife observations and some poetry. There is a gap in the journal entries during the war years when Muriel was too busy with the war efforts to fish, but she takes up her drawing and writing again afterward. A beautiful book for watercolor artists, creative journalers, and anyone who flyfishes. Hard to find. Definitely an interlibrary loan book.

* * *

So, whether or not you dropped everything and read to your kids yesterday, today is your day. The laundry can still wait...

It is what you read when you don't have to that determines what you will be

when you can't help it. - Oscar Wilde

Tomorrow:

D.E.A.R God

D.E.A.R. Children

Today is National D.E.A.R. Day – Drop Everything And Read Day - a day to encourage families to make reading together on a daily basis a family priority. (April 12 is also the birthday of prolific children's author Beverly Cleary (Ramona the Pest, Henry Huggins), and probably the reason this day was chosen to celebrate family reading.)

I was read to as a child and continued the tradition with my own children. I could tell you it was because the behavior had been modeled for me. (It had.) I could say it was because I had been trained as a reading specialist and had taught special reading and knew all the academic reasons why reading to children is important. (All true.) I could even say I did it because I loved my children and was a good mother. (Also true, I hope...). But the real reason I read to my children is because I, myself, love books. I read to my children for all of the above reasons, but also because I got to reread to them books I had loved myself or read great books that were new to all of us.

Like many mothers, I started reading to my oldest daughter when she was a toddler, picture books and simple age-appropriate story books. The reading teacher in me knew that a child's listening comprehension is higher than her reading comprehension by several years, so by the time my daughter was in kindergarten, she was able to sit through extended reading sessions of “chapter books” with few, if any illustrations. My son was three at the time, so I was faced with the challenge of reading to two kids of different ages and interests. I enforced two reading “rules” for our story times that provided some structure and sanity. Rule One was that you could play quietly while Mom read. My daughter could draw, my son could play on the floor with cars and trucks (as long as there were no sound effects). Rule Two was that all questions had to remain unasked until the end of the chapter (end of a page or two for the longer “chapter” books). Then they could ask away without interrupting the flow of the story. It was with these rules in place that I found myself reading C. S. Lewis's The Chronicles of Narnia to a six-year old and a three-year old. My daughter was interested enough in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe to sit beside me without drawing, asking questions at the end of each chapter. My son quietly played at our feet with his trucks, occasionally coming up to look at an illustration we would point out to him. He had no questions.

It was a few months later when I realized just how much young children are able to listen and comprehend when read to under such conditions. The local PBS station was showing The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, and we sat down to watch it as a family. As the show progressed, my son started to make comments about what he was seeing on television, comparing the show to the story - “It didn't happen that way in the book...”, “Oh, the good part is coming up. I really like this next part.” “It's going to get scary now, isn't it?” That little boy occupied with his trucks had absorbed far more from being read to than I had imagined. By the time my third child came along, she probably was cheated out of her fair share of picture books, having become the listener playing on the floor as I read books such as Little Women, Little Men and Jo's Boys to the older two.

I continued to read to my children, together, and individually, until my youngest entered high school. I read them a wide variety of contemporary children's literature, classic literature that would be considered adult books and many biographies and books with historical storylines. My daughters and son are all adults now, and I recently asked them each independently to tell me which books I had read to them that stood out in their memories. Among the books they mentioned, two of them remembered a biography of St. Patrick that I had read to them when they were quite small, a book I myself had read when I was in third grade. All three mentioned another book from my own reading past, Nevil Shute's A Town Like Alice. I had read this book to them when my oldest daughter was in middle school. A story about economic development in the outback of Australia, it's thinly disguised as a historical romance, and includes the brutal forced march of women and children prisoners in Malaya during World War II. What was I thinking at the time? But all three kids remember it fondly...

The two girls were, and still are, avid readers. My oldest always has a wealth of reading suggestions for me. My youngest daughter survived the dearth of picture books in her formative years without much damage, though some people might question it. She's read both Tolstoy's Anna Karenina and Dicken's Bleak House in the past year...for fun. My son, who did not voluntarily read a book on his own until eighth grade, has made up for lost time since, reading incessantly, buying books, perusing the discard sections of libraries and has even admitted to dumpster diving for old textbooks in recycling centers.

O.K., now I'll confess – I never heard about National D.E.A.R. Day until I stumbled upon a reference to it a few weeks back. But I did drop a lot of things to read to my kids when they were growing up – laundry, dishes, dusting, mopping. I regret none of it. And the thought of dropping everything and reading still sounds like a really good idea to me. The unfolded laundry can wait. I've still got a hundred pages to go in The Pillars of the Earth...

Richer than I you can never be

 I had a mother who read to me

- Strickland Gillilan

Tomorrow:

D.E.A.R. Me