the bottomless pit

it's almost february; outside, it's chilled and pale, sky milky with scattered clouds. my inner writer has been nagging me for weeks now: "sit down, you fool, and type!" but i'm on a reading kick, and apparently my inner reader needs to be fed.

i don't know how i would describe these rushes of feeling--cravings, perhaps? the ravenous urge for prose, tripping along the page. i sneak up on it like a predator, i hang round its known watering holes--the library, half-price books, barnes and noble. and then, when i'm not sure i can take the suspense any longer, i pounce.

last night we watched "muppets take manhattan." i hadn't seen it in years; it brought me back to my young days of pink and yellow footed pajamas, with the slippery white padding on the soles of the feet. my mom always cut those off--the feet, i mean--and i don't know why. perhaps she knew that her offspring would have a propensity for wearing nothing on their feet that might constrict their toes. who knows.

anyway, it solidified something in my mind that's been rattling around for the better part of a week: i'm hungry for youth.

not in the perverted sense, mind you. just hungry for that endless, bottomless curiosity, and the energy to satisfy it at any given moment. as i get older, i find that apathy sets in--i'm still curious, but i don't seek it out like i once did.

perhaps it is knowledge that propels? when i was young i read books the same way i do now: i eat them, tear out their innards and savor. i think i read them for a different reason, though. when i was a kid i read to broaden my base of knowledge--what is it like to fall in love? what is it like to have leprosy? what is it like to...be an adult.

now i am an adult. i still fall back into my own personal classics--the 101 dalmations, by dodie smith. charlie and the chocolate factory, by roald dahl. go dog go, by pd eastman.

my childhood friend, rachel, and i used to read large books, just to say that we had read them. we'd closet ourselves in our separate homes for a competitive reading weekend. (i know, how nerdy were we?) this was in sixth grade, i think, when we were about 12 or 13 or whatever age you are at that time. her favorite book was "gone with the wind." i read it just because it was a big book. we came in on monday and i remember she had read the book like 11 times or something. it's a big book; i look at it now and find it daunting. but we were so enamored of that open door--what is beyond this little realm of classrooms, barbie dolls, and the embarrassed pre-puberty showers after gym class?

before that, i'd read michener--chesapeake, alaska, and the omni-present hawaii. that last i found in the basement, along the wall with the few books my parents owned. i read it obsessively; it was a buffet of nouns and verbs, actions and romance, violence, history. i can't say that it set the tune for the rest of my reading diet, but it certainly set the tone for the next few years, during which most of my contemporaries were reading "sweet valley high" and such.

boooooooor-ing. who cares which cheerleader the quarterback dates? puh-lease. not my style.

when i was in 8th grade, i had a crush on one of the kids in my math class: sam. *insert dreamy sigh here* sam'd read during class, while the math teacher droned on about, horror of horrors, fractions. he was reading piers anthony, "a spell for chameleon."

of course i just had to go out and find it. that summer i remember taking the bus downtown to the library, alone, and finding a whole new section: fantasy and sci-fi.

the library was a dream, and being set free in it, with no time limits and a library card, was nirvana.

i think of stopping in the grocery store on the weekend, when they're handing out samples, and that is what i associate with the library: many different options, and you can choose to taste what you like. a smorgasboard of delights.

***

my mom would make new foods for us, when we were young, and my father would intone, above our heads at the dinner table: "try it; you'll like it."

for the most part i try, very hard, to be open to what is being tossed my way. yeah, i'm not perfect--i'm well aware of that. reading is a safe hobby; it's traveling across stormy oceans while sipping cocoa, exploring greenland from the security of my sofa and blankets, soaring through the cosmos and touching stars while my cats are curled at my feet.

i might not be the most adventuresome woman alive, but i certainly hope that my appetite for writing--both reading and creating--is never satiated.