A Dime Well Spent
03/05/03
I do believe there is not a better way to spend an hour on a Saturday morning than with your children perusing old books at one of the sales at Oak Ridge High School.
My ardor for books is boundless. When I was a kid my friends carried around sports cards; I was a card carrying member of the HBC (History Book Club). They went fishing; I went to the library. They hung around school lockers and talked; I ducked into empty classrooms to finish a short story. If there was a book sale within 50 miles, I was there. Naturally, one of my adult obsessions has been whether my kids would be as smitten with dusty old tomes as their dad.
Whole trees fall to the ax to satisfy my 11-year old daughter Alex's unquenchable thirst for ink-based adventure. And my polar opposite 7-year old son Demetrious? He loves it when I read to him, but picking up a book on his own and losing himself in another world seemed a lost cause.
For two years I have taken him to every Oak Ridge book sale. Recently he spotted a sign announcing another and demanded we attend. "I'll pay for my own books," he informed me. Like a warrior on a mission he zeroed in on the children's table. After amassing a sufficient stack, he presented them for check out. I stood well behind him.
A kind lady with a warm smile began tallying the damage. She held up one book suitable for a teenager and commented, "This is for older kids. Can you read it?" Something gently tugged at the back of my mind. Demetri shrugged. She continued sorting until she came to a not-so-gently read Amelia Bedelia book. "How about a dime for this one?" she asked.
"A dime." A flood of memories. By the time Demetri was fishing into his pocket for money I was three decades in the past . . .
One summer day my grandfather brought me a pummeled rummage sale copy of the first volume of Lee's Lieutenants: A Study in Command, by author Douglas Southall Freeman. He charged me a dime and a kiss. It was my first Civil War book. I was ten.
I read it aloud walking along the lilac-studded boundary of our Iowa property line. After a steady barrage of questions my mother dropped a dictionary on a basswood stump. I spent the next week living with a cadre of gentlemen I would never meet, flipping through Webster's and dreaming of another time and place. I still smell pungently sweet lilac whenever someone mentions the Battle of Malvern Hill.
I remember how excited I was when I discovered there were three volumes in the series, and how the librarian with a freshly-sharpened yellow pencil in her hair tried to discourage me from checking them out because I was "far too young to read and understand Freeman." With the second volume under my arm I peddled my green Stingray bike (with the long banana seat) across town to the Union soldier's memorial obelisk in Central Park, where I leaned against the sun-warmed polished granite and devoured the stirring Introduction and first chapter. I finished the book in the back of a Dodge station wagon on the way to New York City, and the third on the stoop of an apartment complex in Brooklyn.
The colossal scope and breadth of books in general, and the Civil War in particular, finally began to dawn on me. It was a dime well spent. . .
I stopped my son as he pulled a few coins from his pocket to pay for his books. "I've got it," I told him with a smile he returned in kind. Before we arrived home he had pulled the torn paperback from the sack and was reading for all he was worth.
"Wanna play some catch?" I asked, hoping I knew the answer.
"No, I want to read." Without another word he walked upstairs and flopped down on his bed. I walked into my library, pulled out that battered first volume of Lee's Lieutenants, and asked him to scoot over.
A dime well spent can still buy you the world.
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I would like to thank everyone who has emailed and called to scream or offer kind words about my musings. My article on SUVs triggered the most reaction, including a published rebuttal! It is nice to know people actually read what I write, even when the point of my subtle tongue-in-cheek waggery is not fully appreciated.
