By The Book

Here's another place I spent a lot of time when I was growing up in Cairo, besides the local Kingdom Hall of Jehovah's Witnesses, or my sister Julie's house. I'm probably the only pre-teen who spent hours in the Cairo Public Library reading back issues of Popular Psychology.

I SWEAR I used to devour that publication trying to figure out what was wrong with me, why I was so melancholy, why I didn't want to party and hang out and do the fun stuff other kids wanted to do. I won't divulge the specifics of my self-diagnosis, but I learned a lot from that magazine. I also used to rip out the Betsy McCall Paper Doll pages and take them home with me.

Yeah, I said it. I'm a thief. Come and get me.

Anyway, I also did some legal stuff at the library. I read all of the Oz books by the time I was 8 or 9, and then moved up to the teen romances, and then eventually Science Fiction. I was probably the only teenager in Cairo who could tell you the difference between "I, Robot" and Isaac Asimov.

Come to think of it, I guess I was a really, REALLY strange kid. But like I said earlier, I think it paid off.

Thank you, Mama, for taking us all to this building and signing us up for library cards by the time we were five or six.

Thank you, dear sweet Library Ladies like Mrs. Ogg and Mrs. Seavers.

Thank you, David, and John, and Julie, and Fred, and Peter and Reuben, and Sarah, and Marilyn, for setting good examples for me and Rebecca about why reading was so important.

Living life "by the book" isn't so bad, after all.