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Both my parents had Masters Degrees, could obviously read, but I never saw them do it.

I grew up hearing Mom brag about reading War and Peace on a canoe trip through the Minnesota Boundary Waters one summer in college. She made it sound like a feat of endurance that placed a permanent notch in her belt, but didn’t convey any other feeling on the subject. Dad, too, treated reading books as a task that should be respected, but not necessarily enjoyed.

He bought The Great Books collection from a door-to-door salesman, proudly set them up in the living room, and then made something like a New Year’s-type resolution to rise early each morning to tackle the Greek Classics. His willpower didn’t hold up for long, but I did see a book open once as I came down for breakfast.

It was as if both my parents were kids and saw reading only as homework. They had respect for the act of reading, but no personal relationship to books.

My older brother Mark and I used to take the school bus together to our private school across town. Everyone else in the neighborhood went to the local public school. Mark was five years older than me and carried thick text books back and forth every day. I, on the other hand, can only remember carrying lunches and occasional art project.

One day, probably related to his having to stay late for sports, I had to carry Mark’s books home on the bus alone. When I got off, a neighbor kid saw me and came over. I told him I couldn’t play, had to get right home to do all the homework that came out of the heavy books he saw me carrying. I complained about how much homework they gave us in private school, and he was impressed. I was impressed by my lie, too. “Wouldn’t it be cool to be grown up enough to really have that much homework?”,  I thought.

I had inherited Mom and Dad’s fear and admiration of books. Heavy, important, but out of reach.

But that changed when I read my first chapter book in the fourth grade. Couldn’t tell you the title, or what it was about, but I clearly remember that first magic door opening into my private imagination.

I was hypnotized by the people and places that jumped off the pages through my eyes and into my mind. Having disappeared upstairs at Grandma and Grandpa’s house one sunny winter afternoon, I lay out my stomach on the bedroom carpet, with rug-burned elbows, and entered my new secret fort. Private, quiet, far away from myself, almost like dreaming, but still awake.

When I realized I might be able to reach the end that afternoon, I looked at the clock and was proud of how much time I’d been reading. When I finished, I ran downstairs to tell Grandma where I’d been and what I’d done. She pretended to be happy for me, but something in her eyes showed worry behind her glasses. I knew that look and I knew it could only mean something unhappy about Mom, her only child—always the smartest and prettiest girl in school. Her pride and joy.

Until she changed.

Grandma waited until I was older to explain. Somewhere in high school, Mom became a serious student. Too serious. It eventually got her Magna Cum Laude at nineteen. She used to lock herself up in the bathroom, all night long, to study. Nobody could make her stop. She had to be perfect. She eventually got shock treatments to snap out of it.

I finally knew what the look behind Grandma’s glasses meant: to her, books could be dangerous.

But, I’ve been able to break the cycle. Books are my friends. They lead me to visualize whole movies out of the stories they tell. I always prefer my movies to the ones they make for the public. When they’re non-fiction, I’m always disappointed by the author’s picture after I find it on Google. The real authors are uglier. The world I live in when I read is a beautiful place, and so are its people. My parents never had this experience with books.

If I had one wish, I’d ask to go back and relive my family with two reader parents carrying beautiful pictures of the world in their heads.

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