Where I grew up, being a bookish, non-athletic momma's boy wasn't exactly the key to making friends. Kids - hell, sometimes adults - saved their own special brand of teasing and torment for guys like me.
Punk
Sissy
Nerd
Fag
I heard it all and on a fairly regular basis. The school bus ride - an hour long trip to and from the burbs - was an especially painful journey. I was a prime and perfect target. There I was, all glasses and crooked afro, boarding the bus with violin and book-bag in tow. I might as well have been wearing a sign that read "Kick me! Kick me hard!!".
The pre-teen years were some of the hardest. As I learned more about myself, the less it seemed like I fit in with others. I felt pressure to be athletic, but I was tragically lacking in skill. I ran track - and was pretty fast - but that didn't count in most eyes. Sissies ran track. Real boys played basketball or football. I felt pressure to like girls, and I did but not nearly with the amount of enthusiasm of other boys around me.
I felt pressure to be dumb.
It seems like I did everything I could to not give in - played violin in the orchestera, studied hard, read voraciously. Books became my weapon against peer-pressure, allowing me an escape from the expectations of others. I had always liked reading, but In '77, at 12 years old, I got lost in a world of books. I emerged 5 years later after reading - inhaling - 162 books (I kept a list). In '81, I even started an asterisk/star rating system. One asterisk got a book a Poor rating. Two was Fair and three was Good. An Excellent book got one big star. Of the the 33 books I read in '81, only one book - Flowers in the Attic by VC Andrews - got the Excellent rating - questionable now, but hey, I was only 16. Sidney Sheldon's Rage of Angels got an Excellent. Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne only managed a Poor. Maybe I had a bias against required reading for school. The strangest book I read was John Fowles' The Magus. I read it when I was 13 and can still vividly recall the sense of confusion I had all throughout the book. One day, I'm going to have to revisit that one.
Ty is well on his way to carrying the bookworm torch. This kid loves to read. We knew this early on but I hadn't expected books to be become such a big thing for him. Ty will latch on to pretty much anything that looks like reading material - magazines, newspaper inserts, catalogs, books. If there are pictures and words, he's drawn to it, and above all else, books are his favorite.
Books to Ty are like music to the savage beast. His wild rumpus through the house - chasing dogs and flinging cups - comes to a complete stop when you stick a book under his nose. It is one of the few moments when he is not in constant motion. It's nice to know that we can slow him down without sticking him in front of the TV, something he has yet to see.
Ty has his own rating system, much less geeky than my own. Least-favored books get rejected immediately and emphatically by way of a head-shake or dramatic "Nooooo!" In a few short months, we've managed to accumulate a pile of these one-asterisk books. Ty rates some books Fair to Good. These are the ones we can get him to sit maybe partially through and sometimes finish before he's pointing, grunting and nahnah!-ing at something else in the pile or on the shelf. One of his formerly favorite books - Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are - has been relegated to Good status. The Excellent rating is reserved for a select few.
Ty gives the nod to two authors - Jane Yolen and Todd Parr. Yolen has a slew of books out but Ty is stuck on the "How Do Dinosaurs...?" series. How Do Dinosaurs Eat Their Food and How Do Dinosaurs Say Goodnight are staples. We end up reading each over and over and over...and over again. It's the same with Parr's books. The Daddy Book and It's Okay to be Different are his favorites. We can never read either just once. There are times when we have to hide them, something I'm not all that happy about but it can't be helped. Ty might not know it, but there is a life outside of book time.
When I first started thinking about being a father, I had imagined my son and I having a biological connection. We'd share the same DNA, maybe have the same eyes or nose. We'd both have an innate distaste of crunchy peanut butter and a fondness for belching in public places (oh wait...we have that). I would hear phrases like "the acorn doesn't fall far from the tree" and nod knowingly. "That's my boy!" I would say proudly, as he came in first in the 200 meter race. But as I approach my mid-40s, dreams of biological offspring are just that - dreams. Surrogacy is way too expensive for me and I'm not expecting anyone to walk up to me and say "Hi there. I'd love to have your baby! For free!!"
After 11 months of caring for a child that is not my own in so many ways - I am certain that having a biological connection with my child is unimportant. Love - my love for Ty - knows no limits and I couldn't imagine feeling any more connected to him.
And maybe our mutual love for books is the equivalent of having the same eyes or nose. It definitely gives me a chance to say "That's my boy! The acorn doesn't fall far from the tree!"
-- D
