Fear

Here is my fear: I will turn into my mother. Oh, I know it's cliched. But I only fear it for one thing: My mother has stopped reading.

Just stopped! The most avid reader I ever knew has ceased to read, and thus... to breathe? Apparently not, but how is this so?
She has lots and lots of books, asks me to get things out of the library for her, even still attends her book club. (Though really, the book club members pretend to have read a book, start to artificially comment on a tiny aspect of said book, and then listen as one member stretches to relate this aspect to something he can argue about, most likely the evils of all things french. But they all get dinner out of it.)
Anyhow, she doesn't read. I suggest books to her all the time. But she says, "No, I won't read it. I just can't sit still. I only read books that I really, really want to read."
Has she forgotten what it is to read? To live in a book? To starve for hours and deprive yourself of using the bathroom because you positively cannot put the book down? To cry at the end of a book and then cry some more because the book is over? To grieve for an actual loss when you close the book?
What if, one day, I stop reading? I worry for my little customers. I sell books to little children and they love them. They read and read. But so many people I know read when they were children and then stopped. After middle school, they never read again. My dad is one of them. He is always telling us what a reader he was, how he soaked up every bit of information he could get his hands on as a child. What happened? I'm trying to instill a life-long love here. Will I fail? It's not worth nothing, I know. Even if they only read one good book, that one is worth it.

I'm starting to lose it, I think. Now that I read so many young adult and juvenile level books to keep up with our stock, I can hardly read an adult book. An adult book takes me ages and I'm always impressed at the sheer number of words on a page. Is this the down-hill slope? Old age here I come.
My sister just recently read Gone With the Wind, a book I own but don't have the gumption to up and start. But whenever I hand her a picture book to look at, she complains about the number of words. She can't put that much effort into a book. Hmm. She's at an interview for vet school today, and I know she'll do well and be accepted to WSU with no problem. But it makes you wonder. If a picture book were a suffering animal, she'd have no problem with all those words, I guess.

Ah, dear.

"So much of what I see reminds me of something I read in a book, when shouldn't it be the other way around?"- Kathleen Kelly