Three Unrelated Memories: BBW Post #4

A few weeks after 9-11, I was at a casino playing Texas hold’em, and the guy next to me was reading something between poker hands. I peeked at what he was reading. It was a printout from The Teheran Times, Iran’s largest newspaper. I was surprised, because the guy appeared to be a sixty-something seed-cap-wearing good ol’ boy—I’d have pegged him for a Rush Limbaugh fan.

“How come you’re reading that?” I asked.

He shrugged and said, “It’s interesting. They have a different perspective on things.”

Later, he told me he didn’t read much. “I’m dyslexic, and I read really slow,” he said. “So when I do read I like to make it count.”

#

On my first day of kindergarten, my mother walked me to the bus stop and waited there with me until the bus came. When the bus dropped me off a few hours later, she was waiting for me. That was the last time my mother appeared at the bus stop with me. Same story for my six younger siblings.

Every so often, in grade school, some kid would show up at the bus stop accompanied by a parent. The other kids would tease him (or her) all the way to school for needing a “babysitter.” The bus stop was not for parents, it was for kids.

#

My parents never once told me what I could or couldn’t read. They weren’t always happy about my choices, however. I can still see my father rolling his eyes at my stacks of comic books. And when, at age twelve, I dove eagerly into the James Bond novels—Sex! Guns! Violence! Martinis!—I can hear my mother saying, “Can’t you find something better to read?” But they never took a book away, or told me I couldn’t read one.

Like every other reading kid in the 1960s, I went straight from “juveniles” (The Hardy Boys, The Yearling, Big Red, A Wrinkle in Time, etc.) into novels written for an adult audience. By my recollection, an “appropriate” book was any book a kid was capable of reading. Back then, from seventh grade on up, it seemed normal for us to be reading adult literature. Transitional literature for teens—what we now call YA—was a miniscule fragment of the literary landscape. These days it has become a extensive, cloistered battleground.

It’s been many years since I was twelve, and I’m sure my memory has been degraded and rewritten, but one thing I know: if my parents had forbidden me to read any particular book, it would have gone to the top of my TBR list. Are teens today any different? I don’t think so.

Celebrate Banned Books Week by reading something that would make your mother blush.