December 28, 2007
Friday

Holidailies is a project mounted and maintained by Austin bloggers Chip Rosenthal and Jette. As I recall, it began in 1999 or 2000 when Jette said she was going to write a post every day in December as a gift to her readers. Her readers, in turn, said, hey, that’s a great idea, and did the same thing, and a community developed. Chip joined the effort in 2003 when he designed the first portal. I missed registering as a participant in 2003, but have been an official member every year since. Holidailies is good for my writing and good for my reading, since it introduces me to new journals every year and pushes me to get reacquanited with writers I’ve been interested in in the past. (I guess in that regard it functions a little like the Dreaded Annual Letter. You forgot you knew these people, and then you read what they’ve been up to for the last year, and you feel like you know them again, at least for a little while.)

This year, for the first time, Jette and Chip proposed a Holidailies Charity Project. They saw it, Chip said, “as an opportunity for the online writing community to come together and act in a small but coordinated way to do some good.” They asked for suggestions, and finally settled on First Book, an organization that encourages children to read and gives children from low-income families the opportunity to read and own their first new books. They’re asking us today to promote this Holidailies day of giving and to write about our own early experiences of books and reading. I couldn’t be happier to do so, since Holidailies has provided so much for me.

As I wrote back in June,

My life as a reader began where many such lives do, at my mother’s elbow. I am told that she would read to me while she nursed my baby sister, three and a half years younger. Chances are she read to me before that, because my inability to remember a time when I was not a reader is probably tied to my being unable to remember a time when books and magazines and other printed matter were not part of my environment. . . . When I was in third grade my parents gave me a red pencil box that looked like a book, with “Knowledge is Power” stamped in gold on the lid. I kept lists of books I’d read and ones I wanted to read in it, and ideas for stories, mostly about a girl who lived on a horse ranch in Wyoming and solved mysteries after school with her twin brother. It was, I suppose, my first journal.

If I can’t precisely remember my first book, I can remember early books. I still have my Better Homes and Gardens Second Storybook, given to me in 1952 by my “Aunt” Jeannette, who always put the quotation marks around “Aunt” because she wasn’t an aunt at all, but a dear and loving friend to both of my parents. Unmarried and childless, she was devoted to me and my sister. She brought us wonderful things at Christmas and our birthdays, always remembering the non-birthday girl with some small item. It was “Aunt” Jeannette who gave me a red-covered book about international children put out by UNICEF. From that book I learned about the St. Lucia celebration popular in Sweden. It so captured my imagination that I recreate it each year with a white-robed candle-crowned doll and cardamom sweet rolls.

“Aunt” Jeannette also gave me Leonard Bernstein’s The Joy of Music in 1964, the year I was a junior in high school. It was accompanied by a live recording of Van Cliburn playing Rachmaninoff’s Third Piano Concerto. The Rachmaninoff was on 12-inch vinyl and was replaced long ago first by cassette tape and then by a compact disc, probably not Van Cliburn’s interpretation. The book, however, remains on my shelf, and when I draw it or the Second Storybook down and open the cover to see my own name written in “Aunt” Jeannette’s hand along with her signature and the date, I am able to touch a piece of the girl I was then and remember a relationship that gave me boundless joy and unconditional love.

I own a lot of books. I buy a lot of them, and more are given to me. I also give books, always, as “Aunt” Jeannette did, inscribing it on the flyleaf with my name and the recipient’s and the date as well and, more often than not, an additional note somewhere in the text at a passage I think particularly appropriate for the recipient or for the relationship that exists between us. Knowledge is power, and there has never been a time in my life when I did not have access to that power nor the ability to give that power to others.

When I started writing this piece I did not know that it would take me down into a memory of someone who is still part of my life but whom I neither see nor communicate with often enough. I’m clicking over to First Book right now, making a donation in honor of my beloved “Aunt” Jeannette. And later today I’ll go to a local bookstore, and find something she might like, that I can write her name and mine in, as thanks to someone who helped shape the child I was, from the woman I have become.

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