There have only been a few books that when I encountered them I was simply compelled to buy, without any prior knowledge of the author. The Prophet, by Kahil Gibran is one of those books. I saw it in a thrift store in Virginia in the 90's and although I couldn't tell what it was about at first glance, it immediately resonated with my soul.
Books have been one of my favorite escapes for as long as I can remember. I've been told that my mother read to me often when I was very little and I was reading by the time I turned four. When they were loading my mother in the ambulance I was calmly perusing my bookshelf to decide which books to bring. During childhood summers I remember reading about a book a day. Lovely fantasy worlds that I needed to visit frequently to survive the reality of mine. One of my favorites that I read over and over again was about a teenage American girl who found out that she was switched at birth with a princess. By the time I was in junior high I had turned to Stephen King and RL Stine. Even when I was grounded from everything else (which was often) my mother still allowed me to read; she recognized it's importance and I am grateful for that. Not all of my memories of reading are happy ones...
We were on a long road trip, I was about 7 or 8, my parents were arguing in the front seat. I was reading in the back seat. It was approaching dusk and my dad told me to stop reading because it was bad for my eyes to read in low light. I closed the book and looked out the window for awhile. When the arguing got too much for me, I picked up my book again; escaping to another world in my mind was my only coping technique at the time. I tried to be sneaky about it and no one noticed for awhile, but eventually my dad realized it. He pulled the car over on the side of the freeway and told me to get out as he took off his belt. I wasn't really surprised, I knew this was a risk I was taking by disobeying. He had me walk around to the back of the car and put my hands on the hood; the familiar sound of the belt sounded different in the open air than it did inside the house. I looked around as the belt hit me again and again, we were almost to the overpass, but I couldn't quite see if there was water or another road beneath it. One car passed, he kept hitting, the rest of my family sat silently in the car. Another car passed. I stared at the back of their heads through the rear window; they didn't even turn around. Another car, and another.
