To address a young person of a certain age with the words “When I was your age…” is to slam a lid on whatever else you might say. Unleash those five monosyllables, and your listener goes deaf as a stone. Should you catch yourself uttering that dire preface, your only recourse is an embarrassed laugh and a change of subject, reining in whatever adages and admonitions you were about to trot out of the corral.
No— if those of us, also of a certain age, wish an audience other than the walking dead, we need a less toxic introduction. After considering the matter, I have decided to adopt as prologue to my reminiscences and lessons the first words from The Great Gatsby: “In my younger and more vulnerable years….”
And so I begin.
In my younger and more vulnerable years, I used to read in bed before sleeping at night and before rising in the morning. I read books: novels for children, volume after volume from The Childhood of Famous Americans series, the Hardy Boys, two or three old Tarzan stories. All grand in their own right, but best of all were the magazines and comics: Boys Life, Reader’s Digest, comic books with heroes like World War II’s Sergeant Rock, and Classics Illustrated.
Classics Illustrated, which I called Classic Comics, were the best of the best.
“Featuring stories by the world’s greatest authors,” the publisher’s logos ran, and lavishly illustrated, these works of art, for so they were in my mind, cost 15 cents a pop from the Weatherwax Drug Store in Boonville, North Carolina, population around six hundred souls, of which I was one. During the summers, I often spent an hour or so reading these and other comic books in this establishment, sitting cross-legged on the floor beside the front window. Looking back, I presume Mr. Weatherwax allowed me to use his pharmacy as the library our town lacked either because he depended on the goodwill of my father, Boonville’s only physician, or because he thought my presence by the glass might attract customers.
I was not a complete mooch. A portion of my weekly allowance went into Mr. Weatherwax’s till, and I returned home richer with another comic or two to add to my collection: Robinson Crusoe, Romeo and Juliet, The Last of the Mohicans, Moby Dick. By the time we moved from Boonville into Winston-Salem, my Classics Illustrated collection had grown to about 120 comic books, a compilation representing an adolescent sense of affection and wonder, valued by me but not by my mother, who gave them away during my first year of college. “You outgrew comics years ago,” she explained. Though this loss saddened me, I know now Mom did me a favor. Had she not disposed of my Classics Illustrated, I would be dragging them around with me today, fifty-five-year old well-thumbed pages crumbling and unread in a storage box.
As is the case with so many other parts of my youth—a lust for candy, especially Reece’s Peanut Butter Cups, my avid interest in collegiate and professional sports, my ability to do homework in front of a blaring television—my habit of reading in bed disappeared. My wife read fiction and biography between the sheets, and we watched television together, but mostly, especially in the last twenty years, bed is the place where, groggy as rubber-legged middleweight, I flop into sleep. Over these same two decades, I have often wakened at three in the morning, yet I rarely remained in bed for reading, choosing instead to throw off the blankets and head for my laptop.
This past month has brought a change, a restoration of books and bed.
A conscious decision, made about a month ago, led me to try reading in bed at night again. Every evening since then, I grab a book, flick on the reading light, crawl beneath two blankets, prop myself on an elbow, and delve into the pages. So far, those books have included a new life of F. Scott Fitzgerald, a novel about finding love in a bookstore, a bleak but possibly consciousness-changing book about the age of the smear in which we live, and a collection of Joseph Epstein’s essays. With the exception of the novel, I don’t read straight through these books, but dip here and there, pausing when some page or passage demands attention, moving on, stopping again. Around me all is darkness and quietude, but that bed is a sanctuary of light, warmth, and words on a page. I have come to relish this last act before sleep, turning a page rather than tapping on a keyboard, reclining rather than sitting, letting sleep come without being kept awake by the latest scandals as reported online.
There are, of course, differences between the eleven-year-old boy and the sixty-six year old man. The eleven-year-old could read enrapt for an hour or more; the man yawns and fumbles for the light switch after fifteen minutes. The boy could rest immobile, propped up on one elbow, his limber frame adaptable to the mattress; the man shifts position every couple of minutes in a vain effort to find comfort.
But the greatest difference between the boy and the man has to do with enchantment. The small pleasure I derive from late night reading is a far cry from the fierce magic of the boy when those Classics Illustrated whisked him away to Africa with Frank Buck, to the American wilderness with Chingachgook, to a desert island with Long John Silver. The exigencies of adulthood had not yet fettered the boy’s imagination; the anvil and forge of good and evil had not yet hammered and shaped his mind and soul. I envy that boy, his enormous joy in his reading, and his innocence. Like most his age, he had no idea what was coming down the pike, approaching more swiftly than he could imagine: the joys and sorrows, the laughter and tears, the triumphs and disasters, the battles with their victories, defeats, and scars.
When finally turning to sleep, the boy used to mumble a few prayers, another practice I have only fitfully maintained over the years. On this particular night, however, I remember the boy, his comics and books, and his prayers, and will slip into sleep with my own brief petitions.
Now I lay me down to sleep, the boy would mutter. I pray the Lord my soul to keep.
A good prayer then.
Even better now.
And so I begin.
In my younger and more vulnerable years, I used to read in bed before sleeping at night and before rising in the morning. I read books: novels for children, volume after volume from The Childhood of Famous Americans series, the Hardy Boys, two or three old Tarzan stories. All grand in their own right, but best of all were the magazines and comics: Boys Life, Reader’s Digest, comic books with heroes like World War II’s Sergeant Rock, and Classics Illustrated.
Classics Illustrated, which I called Classic Comics, were the best of the best.
“Featuring stories by the world’s greatest authors,” the publisher’s logos ran, and lavishly illustrated, these works of art, for so they were in my mind, cost 15 cents a pop from the Weatherwax Drug Store in Boonville, North Carolina, population around six hundred souls, of which I was one. During the summers, I often spent an hour or so reading these and other comic books in this establishment, sitting cross-legged on the floor beside the front window. Looking back, I presume Mr. Weatherwax allowed me to use his pharmacy as the library our town lacked either because he depended on the goodwill of my father, Boonville’s only physician, or because he thought my presence by the glass might attract customers.
I was not a complete mooch. A portion of my weekly allowance went into Mr. Weatherwax’s till, and I returned home richer with another comic or two to add to my collection: Robinson Crusoe, Romeo and Juliet, The Last of the Mohicans, Moby Dick. By the time we moved from Boonville into Winston-Salem, my Classics Illustrated collection had grown to about 120 comic books, a compilation representing an adolescent sense of affection and wonder, valued by me but not by my mother, who gave them away during my first year of college. “You outgrew comics years ago,” she explained. Though this loss saddened me, I know now Mom did me a favor. Had she not disposed of my Classics Illustrated, I would be dragging them around with me today, fifty-five-year old well-thumbed pages crumbling and unread in a storage box.
As is the case with so many other parts of my youth—a lust for candy, especially Reece’s Peanut Butter Cups, my avid interest in collegiate and professional sports, my ability to do homework in front of a blaring television—my habit of reading in bed disappeared. My wife read fiction and biography between the sheets, and we watched television together, but mostly, especially in the last twenty years, bed is the place where, groggy as rubber-legged middleweight, I flop into sleep. Over these same two decades, I have often wakened at three in the morning, yet I rarely remained in bed for reading, choosing instead to throw off the blankets and head for my laptop.
This past month has brought a change, a restoration of books and bed.
A conscious decision, made about a month ago, led me to try reading in bed at night again. Every evening since then, I grab a book, flick on the reading light, crawl beneath two blankets, prop myself on an elbow, and delve into the pages. So far, those books have included a new life of F. Scott Fitzgerald, a novel about finding love in a bookstore, a bleak but possibly consciousness-changing book about the age of the smear in which we live, and a collection of Joseph Epstein’s essays. With the exception of the novel, I don’t read straight through these books, but dip here and there, pausing when some page or passage demands attention, moving on, stopping again. Around me all is darkness and quietude, but that bed is a sanctuary of light, warmth, and words on a page. I have come to relish this last act before sleep, turning a page rather than tapping on a keyboard, reclining rather than sitting, letting sleep come without being kept awake by the latest scandals as reported online.
There are, of course, differences between the eleven-year-old boy and the sixty-six year old man. The eleven-year-old could read enrapt for an hour or more; the man yawns and fumbles for the light switch after fifteen minutes. The boy could rest immobile, propped up on one elbow, his limber frame adaptable to the mattress; the man shifts position every couple of minutes in a vain effort to find comfort.
But the greatest difference between the boy and the man has to do with enchantment. The small pleasure I derive from late night reading is a far cry from the fierce magic of the boy when those Classics Illustrated whisked him away to Africa with Frank Buck, to the American wilderness with Chingachgook, to a desert island with Long John Silver. The exigencies of adulthood had not yet fettered the boy’s imagination; the anvil and forge of good and evil had not yet hammered and shaped his mind and soul. I envy that boy, his enormous joy in his reading, and his innocence. Like most his age, he had no idea what was coming down the pike, approaching more swiftly than he could imagine: the joys and sorrows, the laughter and tears, the triumphs and disasters, the battles with their victories, defeats, and scars.
When finally turning to sleep, the boy used to mumble a few prayers, another practice I have only fitfully maintained over the years. On this particular night, however, I remember the boy, his comics and books, and his prayers, and will slip into sleep with my own brief petitions.
Now I lay me down to sleep, the boy would mutter. I pray the Lord my soul to keep.
A good prayer then.
Even better now.