The Books I Grew Up With

“One fish, two fish, red fish, blue fish…”

My dad read me this Dr. Seuss book so often, I wonder how much he has memorized still.

“This one has a little star, this one drives a little car…”

I know there were other bedtime stories, but this one is the one that has stayed with me from the early years. I loved a specific page where two characters standing back-to-back are trying to talk to each other on the phone, but the mouse has cut the wire, so they hang up. My dad would do a little skit (“Just turn around!”) that I thought was hilarious. The poor guy had to go back to that part of the book over and over.

Then I grew older. Beverly Cleary’s Ramona Quimby entered my life. So did Laura Ingalls Wilder. I checked out Shel Silverstein’s poetry from the school library regularly. And the summer my family read the Harry Potter books together was probably one of my favorites. Mom would read ahead during the day, and at night would encourage my dad to keep reading aloud because the next chapter was so good…

By the time the fifth book in Harry’s story was released, I had started reading them myself. But the first four were narrated by my dad, and he even used voices! I loved his Hagrid most.

As time passed, I grabbed more and more books. And I loved so many of them. Some are on my shelf in my house. Some may have been forgotten over the years. But books have been important to me since the moment my parents started reading to me.

It wasn’t just that they read to me. I saw them reading! The two authors I saw the most were Nora Roberts in Mom’s hands and Louis L’Amour in Dad’s. And yes, sometimes it was vice versa!

If you look at my bookcase, you’ll see both authors there, too. My folks have good taste.

My brothers don’t have the love of books that I do, and that’s okay. I’ve got a bad enough book buying problem for the three of us. And my husband has other things to occupy his time with that he finds more interesting.

That’s not to say Erik doesn’t get into reading with Emma and her bedtime stories. I love listening to him, especially when he uses voices like my dad did for me. I hope our kids will have good memories surrounding books. I hope in the future, when I visit their homes, I’ll see titles that I recognize and authors that we loved together.

But if I just see a stack of video games, I’ll know they take after their dad. And hey, video games, movies, books… They’re all stories, and I think they all count.