My Favorite Place to Go
by Bobbi Jean Bell
My favorite place to go, from as far back as I can remember, was the local library. We were a library family. A weekly visit was prepared for with great delight and anticipation. While reading all the titles borrowed from the previous visit, I'd be making a list of books to bring home the next visit. As the youngest of us kids, I always enjoyed exploring the titles my older brother and sister chose. I was often told, “You’re not old enough yet for this book.” I couldn’t wait to be old enough!
When I think back to the library days, I don’t have a strong memory of any one
book. Books quickly came into and out of my life. Ravished and consumed. Read
aloud. Read silently. Then, returned. That all changed in 1966 when my sister,
Wendy, gave me my first book.
My book.
For me.
Oh! What an unexpected gift!
The Golden Treasury of
Poetry: Selected and with a commentary by Louis Untermeyer, illustrated by
Joan Walsh Anglund
After unwrapping this gorgeous book, I sat with Wendy to
begin our exploration of poetry. A first for me. She found favorites in the
collection and together we read them aloud. We exclaimed over the
illustrations. We found time to peruse the chapters – reading one from
“Creatures of Every Kind” and then, perhaps, another from “Unforgettable
Stories” or “Laughter Holding Both His Sides.”
It is here that I met my first pirate, characters from the Canterbury Tales,
Robin Hood, and Queen Mab. It is here that I read aloud, for the first time,
Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky,” and Edward Lear’s limericks. Robert Louis
Stevenson, William Blake, Emily Dickinson, Wiliam Shakespeare, Robert Frost,
Ogden Nash, T. S. Eliot… and more… and more… and more. Each poem became a
friend. What a treasure! Each poem, an adventure. Words to relish, to savor, to
ponder, to revisit.
Wendy is eight years my senior. She took me to my first live theater performance, Tartuffe, at New Haven’s Long Wharf Theatre. Together, we explored Shakespeare and Mozart and Bach. We gathered in her room every Saturday afternoon to listen to the Metropolitan Opera on the radio. Her passion for the written word was contagious.
Even as our lives took us miles apart, books kept us
together. Hours on the phone catching up with what we were reading. And many
more hours of our lives sharing our passion for reading with others. For her, as
a Children’s Librarian. For me, through interviewing writers on live radio.
I don’t know if The Golden Treasury of
Poetry is still in print. I still have mine. It’s worn to the point of
lacking resale value. You can see, though, in one of the pictures that the book
is happiest being open—and that is priceless.
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| Bobbi Jean Bell |
