It’s 1959. I am sitting on my twin bed on the second floor of our two-story colonial.
My GE transistor radio is on my night stand – blaring the song “A Teenager in Love” by Dion and the Belmonts.
I am annoyed. My little brother is pesty. My little sister too young to hang-out with. My parents clueless.
Books are my salvation:
Seventeenth Summer
Marjorie Morningstar
The Diary of Anne Frank
And thanks to an ahead-of-the curve friend possessing precocious mental acuity – Miracle at Carville.
As I do today, I read for a variety of reasons:
Diversion
Escape
Information
Enjoyment
Plot Character
Knowledge
Expanding vocabulary
Finding out how others view the world
Many things have changed since 1959. My transistor radio is in some junk heap, replaced by my trusty cell phone and Pandora. My brother is no longer pesty. My childhood home has known many other owners. And my parents are gone. My sister has become more “hanging-out worthy.”
But my love of books is still enduring, voracious and strong. And I keep buying them like crazy and finding crazy ways to store them.
Here’s a book that checks all the boxes of why I avidly read:
All Adults Here by Emma Straub
All Adults Here is a wealth of SAW: Stand Alone Wisdom. Straub’s priceless observations prove that there is angst (and joy) at every age and every stage – affording us the opportunity to learn through someone else’s hard won knowledge, not our own.
The following Stand-Alone Wisdom tidbits are too enlightening not to share:
The blessing of being a grandparent was knowing all the things that had to be done and having the time to do them.
It was hard to keep a secret in a small town but as Astrid had learned, everything was easier when you were a woman over fifty. That’s what made Astrid cry, she realized.
Adults – even nice ones like his parents, who understand that their children are autonomous human people and not robots created just to please them – couldn’t remember what is was like…
When you were in your childhood house on a regular basis, it was harder to separate the past and the present – nostalgia only worked with distance.
So much of becoming an adult was distancing yourself from your childhood experiences and pretending they didn’t matter, then growing to realize they were all that mattered and composed 90 percent of your entire being.
Mothers-in-law don’t matter in marriages, except as points of contrast.
There is nothing more stable than an elderly lesbian.
The boys at her old school now seemed like…docile idiots for whom pizza solved any emotional difficulty.
At that moment, Cecelia was pretty sure she didn’t know anything about anything, and that she was the most pathetic teenager who had ever lived, but at least she knew what she was going to wear on the first day of school.
Perfection was impossible and failure inevitable.
Parents knew that the hardest part of parenthood was figuring out how to do the right thing twenty-four hours a day forever, and surviving all the times you failed.
That was the plan: pretend to be the person you’d like to be.
Doing stupid things didn’t have to be wasted on the young.
Sibling relationships were as complicated as any marriage, without the possibility of divorce.
She didn’t ask questions if she thought the answers would lead to conversations she wasn’t ready to have.
Memorial services were exactly like weddings – you never talked to the people whose names were on the invitation, and you spent the whole time catching up with acquaintances, while holding disposable plates and paper napkins
She wanted to be so indispensable to someone, to be so important, that a causal erasure was impossible.
Parents were supposed to be there. That was their whole job. Good, bad, whatever – the very lowest job requirement was to be there.
That was he problem with being part of a family: everyone could mean well and it could still be a disaster.
It took so little, truly, to turn a parent’s frown upside down.
What book does it for you?
What book helps you Preserve Your Bloom?
Iris Ruth Pastor