The Power of Story

I am a book geek. I have stayed up all night to finish a gripping story more times in my life than I am able to count. I am compulsive about finishing books. A book really has to be bad or fail to grip my interest in a phenomenal way for me to fail to finish it. Failing to finish a book usually has something to do with overdue library fines too, because I don't really want to pay for a bad book on top of waste time reading it.

Z belongs to a book club. It is the coolest book club for boys that I could imagine, entirely because my friend is a very cool mom and she works hard each month to make this book club rock. Today they will meet to discuss the book Where the Red Fern Grows. Z is a very tender-hearted guy and I knew that this book would slay him. I don't know anyone who hasn't been slain by the end of this book. As of yesterday, Z was still about halfway from finishing this book. Usually, he flies through books but he was having a hard time getting into this one and it had taken a while for him to get this far. But the power of story finally grabbed him this morning and he crawled into the guest room and shut the door to block out distractions and he read and read and read. I wanted him to finish before book club because I knew he'd find out the ending one way or another then and I wanted him to have his own quiet time with his emotions and not be stunned by them in the open club, surrounded by a dozen 8 and 9 year old boys. So, I'm the mean mom who hovered around, waiting for him to get to the sad part. Eventually he got there--about lunch time--I checked on him and his face said it all. Tears streaming down his face, he asked for some tissues and then he asked to be alone to finish the book. This is the boy that cried when Sirius died at the end of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. There was no way around his emotions getting the better of him at the end of Where the Red Fern Grows. I wasn't excited for him to go through this emotional pain, not really. But I was excited and I am always excited when my kids get so into a story that it takes them beyond our little stucco house in the desert. It tickles my momma heart pink when my kids sleep with books, when they can't take their noses out of them, when a trip to the library is THE coolest thing we could do of a summer afternoon. Story is transcendent, story is power and story deepens our humanity and helps us to understand places and ways we will never otherwise experience. And there are certain stories that I think every person should get lost in at least once.

Yes, I am a book geek and few things would make me happier than to find I have raised a new generation of proud book geeks, with the circled eyes from getting lost in a story to prove it.