Like many children, I dreamed about having a secret hideaway. I read and re-read The Secret Garden, and even envied The Boxcar Children their secret clubhouse in an abandoned train car. Although I never had the tree house I coveted, and my own house was without a secret walled garden, my childhood was full of the kind of places only a child could appreciate. Though my mother had few positive things to say about the house where she spent her teenage years, my grandparents’ mouldering (and moldy) Victorian in Uptown Minneapolis was hallowed ground for my brother and I and our cousins. The house itself was hardly a secret, but the world we constructed there as children, and the mythology that grew up along with us, was hidden from the adults in our lives.
The house was bursting at the seams with reading material. Fresh from whatever season it was, we would burst onto the porch and knock on the door. We knocked only on ceremony as it was never locked (to my mother’s horror.) Grandpa would greet us in the foyer with a hug, we would take off our shoes and coats, and we’d be off. On our arrival, we would careen through the living room to pound our fingers like elephant’s feet on the grand piano. By the fireplace, leather bound volumes handed down from my grandfather’s family flaked behind glass. The dining room held little that was of interest to us, so we would race back into the foyer and up the stairs. On the landing, we would pause at the foreboding portrait of William James Romeyn, one of our New England Calvinist forebears. At the top of the stairs we would stop in my grandfather’s study, where the shelves overflowed with titles about East Asia and Chinese religion. In the TV room, where television was rarely watched at all, we would rifle through my dictionary-loving grandmother’s condensed version of the Oxford English Dictionary.
The other bedrooms, relics of my mother’s and her siblings’ youth, were good places to find my mother’s copy of Blueberries for Sal or an uncle’s well-worn edition of Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions. My grandparents’ room was home to my grandmother’s own wall of books. If I came over without anything to read, I would invariably leave with something she deemed to be “good” reading material. A summer afternoon often ended with me lying on my stomach on a wicker couch on the porch, drinking lemonade and reading. Opposite me, my grandmother would study the New York Times crossword puzzle over the edge of her reading glasses.
If my grandparents’ house was hallowed ground in the story of my literacy, my grandmother might have been the person who turned me into a bibliophile. For all of my life, she grandmother found ways to nurture each of our talents. My cousin Molly was the dancer, Jessica the musician and my brother Michael the scientist. She must have decided I would be a writer, because she gave me a copy of Pride and Prejudice for my eighth birthday. In order to prove everyone wrong, I struggled through the whole thing. A year later, she gave me Mill on the Floss, which I inhaled. I loved the story of Maggie Tulliver and her brother, even relishing the novel’s rather dismal ending. For my 11th birthday, I received a copy of Roget’s Thesaurus, and my eighth grade graduation gift was a copy of the short stories of Flannery O’Conner. The books my grandmother gave me fired my imagination and fueled my own dreams of becoming a famous writer someday.
I breathed books; I had a book in progress at all times. Even as I was being diagnosed with a spatial learning disability that made math and other school activities excruciatingly difficult, I retreated into my worlds of reading and writing. At school, I might be found reading one of the Ramona books. On the school bus, I would be buried in L.M. Montgomery. At home I might as easily be reading Great Expectations as re-reading the Little House books for the third time. On the floor in my bedroom, I filled notebooks with elaborate stories and novels (none of which I ever finished). My grandmother both encouraged and no-so-subtly-steered our reading interests. She once broke my brother’s heart when she asked him if the Stephen King novel he was reading was “one of those books they sell at the airport.” Yet her first question on seeing us was always, “what are you reading?”
My grandmother, as it happens, was my introduction to libraries as well. My adoration of my librarian grandmother led to my announcement, at four, that I was going to be a librarian when I grew up. My grandma Taylor gave me my first library card when we visited the branch where she worked. Our family also made frequent trips to our neighborhood library, where our ritual was to run to the children’s area and look at the display case of felt mice. In the winter, the mice would be dressed in hats and scarves. In the summer, they might be seated around a picnic blanket. The little mice lured me into their tiny world, where I would stare with my nose pressed against the glass. When I was in preschool, my teachers asked a number of us what we would be if we could be anything, and printed it in the school newsletter. One little boy wanted to be a dragon. I answered (and I quote) “I feel like I want to be a librarian.”
As we grew older and my grandmother’s health declined, we (the grandchildren) recognized that our childhood space was threatened. We darkly contemplated the path our lives would take without the house (and with the unspoken assumption that we were talking about the path our lives would take without grandma). A shaky video we produced with a hand-held camera preserves the spaces that were so filled with meaning for us: the attic closet where little Molly’s imagined “baby ghosts” lived, the filled in room under the garage, the walk-through coat closet where we hid under piles of dusty winter coats during games of hide-and seek.
My grandmother died of lung cancer on a freezing March day three months before I graduated from high school, and the house was sold soon after. The day before she died, we gathered in chairs around the bed where she lay still and quiet. To pass the long hours of waiting, my Grandfather began reading her memoirs out loud and it was if she could speak again. We passed the book from hand to hand, filling the quiet room with her own stories about her childhood in Brooklyn. Across the country, unknowingly, my mother’s sisters did the same. As she lay prone and struggling to breathe, we gave back to her the love of language and reading that she gave to us. Even after five years, my grandmother’s voice is still the voice of discretion when I choose a book to read.