We Are What We READ

Wow! I'll bet that comes as a surprise to you. But, if you think about it, it is true. Let me show you.

As a small child I was read bedtime stories from a collection of Children's Best Loved Bible Stories. My sister still has it. The pastel pictures are serene. She has kept that book through times when all she owned was in two suitcases and that book is HEAVY. Every night, right after saying our prayers, we'd get a story out of that book. I barely recall some of them. They could be why I was kicked out of a church at fourteen. You see the stories are wonderful, but they weren't exactly bible accurate. Many people are unaware of this. Awareness isn't comfortable. As a fourteen year old and now adult, I question things.

After I was able to read for myself, I found a set of pastel leather-bound classics. I had to read them, there weren't any other books--almost. One of those classics was Ivanhoe, which is ok for a story, but it is better split up quite a bit. Imagine a book containing Robin Hood, A Knight in Shining Armor, and Repunzel? That's Ivanhoe. Other classics included Tarzan, Water Babies, and Robinson Crusoe. Robin Hood had me play fighting with long sticks and sneaking up on unsuspecting travelers. Did I mention I grew up on a classic farm in southwest Kansas? We had a flashflood kind of dry creek with HUGE trees in it. Perfect Robin Hood areas. You can float down a creekbed in four inches of water flow. I and my siblings spent a lot of time as water babies.

That classic farm contained pigs, ponies, horses, dogs, cats, mice, fish, ducks, chickens, rats, cattle, calves, skunks, rabbits--both domestic and wild, turkeys, owls, cougars, coyotes, deer, bleached bones, bumble bees, wild roses, moss, miniature clams, coon-hunting hound dogs, raccoon, magpies, snakes, turtles, lizards of various kinds, and, of course motor cycles, bicycles, wheat, outbuildings, windmills, as well as trucks, trailers, combines, tractors, milking machines, cream separators, pasteurizers, swingsets, quicksand, waterholes, gardening, boating, fishing, and riding the water tank . The best yet, was that we lived in the fork of two of these creeks which would flash flood every spring for at least a week. During that week the school bus could not come. Many times the electricity would be off--sometimes for the duration. So, from Tarzan I could understand being alone and living with nature. I wasn't abandoned, but spent a lot of time alone. Tarzan coped. I too learned to cope and read animals, wind, and examine plants. There is a wonderful elephant-eared kind of tall plant which has leaves that feel like velvet. Great toilet paper. My sister and I called it toilet paper plant. Fuzzies are nasty little fuzzy looking things whose fuzz is actually tiny stickers that jut out any direction. If you get close to a fuzzy, you're going to need a knife to scrape them out of your hide. Yes, like Tarzan, I always carried a knife for just such emergencies. Still do.

I read Robinson Crusoe and read about his few grains of wheat and how long it took him to get them to grow and then replant until he had been marooned a few years and he finally had enough wheat to grind flour and make some bread. His determination, care, and finally, the reward of a loaf of bread struck me greatly. Crusoe's attempt to make a canoe and then to have made one too heavy to move. His crushing disappointment and yet I understood. On the farm sometimes things are built that seem like a great idea and then...oops...and you're stuck with a monument to your stupidity.

A book I read as soon as I found out the school had a library was The Village That Slept. I read it twice a school year for several years. It was about a plane going down in the Alps. A boy named Franz, a girl named Lydia, and a baby about a year old was all they found that survived. The three of them roamed the mountains until they found a deserted cabin and then later a deserted old village. The contents of Franz's rucksack kept them going until they could figure out where an old abandoned garden was. They lived carefully, yet well, while they waited for rescue. It took over a year. Self reliance was the lesson I learned there. If you can't be rescued, then be prepared to stay alive until you are. Life doesn't have to be awful while you're waiting. Many a time this lesson has been helpful to me.

And then I found the public library. Oh, my. Science fiction became my companion. I traveled to fare planets and fought while riding dragons. I read the entire science fiction section of our library at just the right time to start learning about being a smart Alec, I discovered Agent of the Terran Empire. Oh, my. He was the best at being such a quipish fellow with flagons of flash and irony (Think James Bond layered with backtalk). Probably many could do without my brand of speech, but just blame it on my reading material from a formative time....

Then ROMANCE became my companion. Oh. Oh, my, my, my, my, my!! I've read up it and down it, and then quite widely too. As I've gotten older, I've noticed a desire to watch my fellow man, especially the one I eventually married. So many things we read in romances that happen are definitely NOT true. Yet they make fun reading. They are things we (many women) would LIKE to have happen. Take the day my mister accused me of intentionally making him look foolish in front of a business someone. It was NOT true. I didn't know I did it. Worse why would anyone do that, let alone me? I was immediately cut to the quick and as we'd just pulled up in front of a hardware store, when he got out so did I. He went in the store and I stomped off across an empty lot towards the grocery store. I didn't tell him where I went. According to all the romances I'd read, he should have come to look for me and apologized. I was in front of the grocery store staring at the pay phone when it dawned on me that I didn't know who to call. Worse. I suddenly realized that if he'd walked off on ME, he could figure his own way home. I wouldn't be looking for his sorry rear. Ooops. Why would I expect him to act any differently than myself? Yikes! I went back to the corner of the grocery store and looked back at where the pickup should have been. It was gone. DANG! Suddenly, I heard the engine and it pulled into a carwash slot at the other end of the grocery store. My man got out and started washing the pickup. I quietly walked up to the passenger door and got in, not saying a word. Blessing my lucky stars, I kept my mouth shut and realized that perhaps I shouldn't rely on romance novels to learn about the care and feeding of a male. We didn't speak until we got home. He never realized I was only angry and walked off, he figured the fight was over and I'd gone to the grocery store for something. He'd noticed I wasn't in the pickup, but figured he'd wash the pickup before trying the store. I've never bothered to change his opinion of that--because the truth doesn't make me look too smart. We would, though, like to THINK our man would hunt us down to ask us what was the matter and beg forgiveness.

What does all of this mean? It means that my work reflects my reading material. It means my philosophy of life has been influenced, reflected, or perhaps resonated with what I read. As many writers will tell you, you can't write about things that don't go in your head first. What comes out, has had to have gone in before the writing begins. Even pure fantasy has had to have something that bases in reality or there can be no empathy.

So what? Well, so if you're a trifle bored with your writing and want to 'change' it up a bit, then read something off the wall for you. Go outside your comfort zone. For me, that would be reading something biographical. I'm not big on real people stories. They are usually so sad to me. But, that would be influencing my writing in a different direction and may be worth the time. However, if I do, I think I'd like to read about the mountain man, left for dead after a bear attack by his two companions. They took everything useful with them because they thought him dead. He dragged his broken, bleeding, body....and hunted them down. Or perhaps Winston Churchill's story. He escaped from somewhere in South Africa and made his way north....

Oh, see how even the things that I think I might be interested in have a similar theme to what I've read before. Maybe there is no such thing as change...just different. Maybe I am what I read--a questioning, survival obsessed, smart Alec, with romantic fantasy tendencies....