I’m up early again. 4:30 this morning.  Surely, I have won a prize.

I decided to read this morning.  An hour later, I switched to writing.  And the Word doc hadn’t been opened two seconds before I was where I had decided I wasn’t going to go today.  And I said out loud, “I better get out before I fall in.”

I’m trying something new: reading more than one book at a time.  I’ve always been a strict linear reader.  Read one book at a time and always finish a book.  A few years ago an avid reader friend said something like, “There are too many good books out there! If a book doesn’t get me in the first twenty pages, I put it down.” At those words, astonished, I put her in book warrior armor.  Up to that point, the only book I remember not finishing was Moby Dick when I was in college.  A pang of lagging guilt is still withstanding.

More recently, I read an article on how to read more than one book at a time.  The suggestion was to pick books from different genres.  That makes complete sense, for example, to read two or three romance novels at a time, one might get the love interests confused and end up with one crushingly gorgeous man and scores of long-haired woman chasing him in pursuit of a red rose.  That would be blurring the lines of romance novel reality.

An author friend loaned me a non-fiction book called The Barn at the End of the World: The Apprenticeship of a Quaker, Buddhist Shepherd.  Last week I moved it from the book shelf into circulation, thinking it wouldn’t get too entangled in Paris Was the Place, a piece of fiction I’m reading, or rather listening to, for my book group.  I’m struggling with this piece of fiction; the voice on the Audible version is not pulling me into the story.  I need to go back to old-fashioned paper-page-turning reading of this title.

I rarely accept loaned books and am now practicing good loaned-book manners for The Barn…  Three rules apply: I can’t dog ear the pages at the top in order to mark my place; I can’t dog ear the pages at the bottom to mark passages to reread later; I can’t read with a pen in my hand to underline well-written lines that grab me by the hand, the throat, or the cuff of my neck.  Or the tear ducts.  I’m using a bookmark and snapping pictures of sentences.  This foreign procedure is tedious.  I strip my surroundings of pens before sitting down.  A fold can be smoothened; an ink underline is unforgiving.  I am enjoying the pencil underlining and notes that my friend made as she read the book.  I’m happy to see that she, too, makes notes.  Although hers are more reserved than my near graffiti black ink lines.

Over and over, I hear that writers need to be avid readers.  I’m not as avid as some.  In reading The Barn…, I am finding a relatable voice with relatable experiences.  A good boost in legitimating my own writing.  The author, Mary Rose O’Reilly, writes about working on a sheep farm.  We didn’t raise sheep when I was growing up.  Maybe an oddball sheep was brought into the fold occasionally.  I seem to recall a goat, a couple of rabbits, and perhaps a sheep rambling through my farmyard memories. 

O’Reilly has a conversation with the farmer she’s working with about the language used to call the sheep versus that used to drive the sheep.  Her words drove powerful holograms of my family right up off the page.  My mom milked cows morning and night.  After the grain was laid in the manger, she would open the barn doors to the feed lot and call, “Com’boss!  Com’boss!”  The lilt of those words were inviting.  It was like a chant. The accent was on “Com,” and “boss” dropped down in pitch.  And the cows would come gently lumbering into the barn, each to her own known stanchion.  I, like my mom, can call cattle.

On the other hand, the driving verbiage was dead-on Grandma Murphy and my dad when the cattle got out or were being driven somewhere they didn’t want to go.  As the sheep farmer laid it out in the book, “Don’t say ‘go!’ to them… They don’t know that word.  They know Hai! They know OK!  They know Hai-up, you goddam sonsa bitches!” (p. 64-65). That was an epiphany for me.  Over years and years of hearing those very same last four words strung together in repetition, never had I thought of it as a language the animals understood.  I only ever heard it as Grandma and Dad’s heightening anger at the cows.  Thinking back on these cattle driving moments, I remember how impressive this cussing was when those words were yelled over and over in one breath.  Their inflection was stronger than dropping any f-bomb in the middle of that tirade.  I, unlike Dad and Grandma, cannot drive cattle.

This morning I pulled a book of poetry off the shelf, New and Selected Poems: 1962-2012, written by Charles Simic.  When I attended the New York State Summer Writers Institute in 2018, I met this poet after he did a reading one evening.  A prolific poet, Simic was born in 1938 in Belgrade, Serbia.  I’ve only ever been attracted to children’s poetry.  In college, I struggled with poetry class, drawing blank looks at the smooth voiced professor trying to get poetry to connect with me, or vice versa.  Give me the rhymes of Shel Silverstein and Dr. Seuss. However, I laughed at some of Charles Simic’s poems as he read them, so I bought his book and waited in line for him to sign it.  I was the last person let into the queue.  I sat down across from him, and we chatted about ordinary people stuff for a few minutes.  Now, I’m reading about ordinary people stuff in his poems. 

In genres outside of fiction, I find more unfamiliar vocabulary.  Yesterday, I thought how efficient it was to tap a word into my phone and have the definition spring up.  Ideally, I would grab that definition, plug it into the sentence, and continue on my way with the next sentence.  Not so.  That is a mighty all-purpose detractor.  Many minutes passed before I moved from screen pages back to paper pages.  Today, I pulled Webster off the shelf and practiced letter sequencing as I looked up “Hittites” and “pitch.” 

Going to those pages reminded me of watching Will and Liam looking up vocabulary words when they were younger.  Another mom and I would laugh at how long it took our kids to look up ten words because they would start reading the dictionary.  Perhaps that was the teacher’s intent, for this morning I learned not only that Hittites are an ancient people from Asia Minor and northern Syria but also that another name for hobgoblin is bugbear.  I had only been looking for clarification of Simic’s poem titled “Concerning My Neighbors, the Hittites.”

Two days ago, I took a bubble bath and purposely left my phone in the kitchen.  While the bath tub was filling, I went into my bedroom to pick up The Barn…, but I had taken it downstairs earlier that morning.  Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone was in the book sculpture stacked on my bedside table.  I decided to try one of my son Will’s reading tricks: open a favorite book to a random page and start reading.   I sunk into the bath and into the line midway down page 71.

“Welcome,” said Hagrid, “to Diagon Alley.”  I followed Harry with the goblins down to the bowels of Gringott’s Bank through the brick wall on platform 9 ¾ at King’s Cross and onto the glorious scarlet steam engine where Harry shared chocolate frogs with his new best friend Ron.  Sheer fantasy.  Potent escapism.

As Ron was explaining Quidditch to Harry, the real boy Liam called out to me from behind the bathroom door.  “Mom!  Mom!  Your phone is ringing! I don’t know if you have new texts or calls!”  I didn’t have the heart to tell him that I had planned on ignoring beeps and whistles until I came back downstairs.   

“Thanks, honey,” I returned as he delivered to my bath non-fiction with a splash of fiction, perhaps needing the intercedence of poetry.  Or fantasy.

Another random thirty-some-page escape is on the books for today; at which time, I shall put the phone securely under my mattress.