Raised by books

When I recall my childhood, there are many scenes of my hands passing over spines of books. These books were in many places of our house. There was a library in our basement. There was also a library in our hallway, which connected all our rooms. And there was a small library in the sala, too. My father had this amazing system of speakers that could be found in certain areas of the house all the way to the garden. My mother would play music and it would reverberate throughout the entire house. We’d be doing such humdrum things and then Mario Lanza would come on and humdrum didn’t seem so ordinary after all. My brother Chino would stop whatever mischief he was up to, making spectacles for his cats, for example, and pause at Mario Lanza’s crescendo and — literally — tears would roll down his cheeks. I knew then we were not normal, for how easy it was for all of us to give in to the finer feelings of the soul.

In these scenes of my hand passing over spines, I am always alone. I am not sure if this is true or if the memory wishes me to be alone. Perhaps it is because I always link my love of reading to acute loneliness. There is a loneliness in childhood that is rarely spoken of. I used to think I was the only lonely child. I’ve since revised this opinion, observing that loneliness is at the core of everyone I’ve ever met. Perhaps modern life teaches us, falsely to some degree, that loneliness is bad, something to be avoided. In fact, it may be even successfully avoided by having unlimited texting, surfing, tweeting and what-have-you.

I’m a bit older now and see loneliness as an ally. Perhaps loneliness is lonely too. I think loneliness is a constant invitation to some kind of quietness and stillness. There might be something intrinsic in us that might actually yearn and need loneliness. In fact, I think loneliness is what allows great acts of imagination to happen. It is certainly my tie to God.

But this was not meant to be a spiritual tract; rather more a reflection on what books have done for me and how books have essentially raised me. And yes, raised me because I’ve revised my opinion on who or what raised me as well. My parents were extremely busy people, busy certainly with the upkeep of six challenging children. And so a lot of my care in those beginning years seemed largely kept to my siblings. My sisters Plet and Non raised me on what Elizabeth Browning writes in her poem “to the level of everyday’s most quiet need.” (I learned that poem from a book my mother kept in the library!) Meaning they put me to sleep, they accompanied me to the bathroom, they took note of my nightly regimen. It was the sisters who comforted me in moments of fear in the middle of the night. My brother Coke always gave me a book whenever he earned money as a violinist in a youth orchestra. My favorite was when he gave me Alice in Wonderland and the complete Tolkien in a fancy box case. I read them, eager to impress him. In the evenings, after his violin lessons, he would do spelling games with me.

I think now that the books that inhabited our home and the music that wafted throughout our halls were our parents’ way of raising us, of having a voice in our consciousness no matter what. Today as I visit the homes of all my siblings, each one has a massive library and as I pass my hands across their books, we share a common canon: the American novelists my father so loved: Updike, Bellow, Roth, Vidal and Irving. And my mother’s own favorites: Collette, de Maupassant, Poe, Browning, Frost, Stevenson, Wordsworth, my mother, an obvious romantic based on these samples. At night, when we’d say good night to our parents, they’d be reading away, a bowl of peanuts between them and I remember thinking that this is what bliss is: peanuts and books at the end of the day. What more could you ask from life?

In my angst-ridden, difficult high school years, when I refused to be parented, I continued to be parented by books. I picked up One Hundred Years of Solitude because the cover was sexy and I was stupefied by the idea that my mother would read anything sexy! Taciturn and cross, my mother would continue to pile books onto my side table: Capote, O’Connor, the Brontes, more and more and more poetry and when I would relent and let her love me, out would come the sonnets which she would recite as I lay on her bed.

All these memories have come to the fore these days because I am in the middle of moving houses. I am struck by the patterns of our life: books and music dominate the lives of my children. Packing their rooms, I admonish them to decide which books deserve to be moved. They must be ruthless, I tell them. Only those that they love must be moved. The rest can be sold at the garage sale or given away. I help them decide as we go through their books, somehow canonizing and favoring others, letting them be free to choose but also parenting by keeping tomes that they rejected but might just make room for in the future. My daughter holds Anne Frank in her hand and looks at me quizzically. This is a book she has struggled with for years, opting to leave the book whenever the sadness would imperil her otherwise beautiful world. I nod solemnly. Yes, Anne is coming with us to the new house.

Suddenly, I am frantic about whether I have given them really good books to live by. I run to the bookstore and try to plug in the missing holes in their canon. I do this as if it were a matter of life and death. I see Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses; this is a must-have even if no longer applicable for their age! It must be on their shelves! I pick up yet another copy of To Kill A Mockingbird, unsure whether we’ve lost it along the way. Little Women? Oh my goodness, there’s a Little Women vampires version? I put that aside and grab two Nancy Drew titles. I am aware this is no longer appropriate either, after they have all read The Hunger Games. But I decide to be like my mother and surreptitiously make these available anyway, banking on time and its ability to weed the chaff from grain.

I look at other titles and wonder if they should be in our library: Why Women Need Chocolate. 1001 Ways to be Romantic. Hmmmm… perhaps best for my sons to have access to these so that they become good lovers and husbands. From the corner of my eye I see Steinbeck’s The Pearl. I grab it. This, this, we must have, even if no one reads it. It’s a lot like deciding to have a gravy boat, sometimes. I’ve never used a gravy boat, but I have a gravy boat. I use the same principle and get a copy of The Communist Manifesto, Thoreau’s Walden, Woolf and Lindbergh. I toss in Fahrenheit 451. I buy Proust for when they are in college and because it’s on sale. I must add to our Philippine Lit collection, and run to those shelves! But before that, I grab a Children’s Bible — but I grab a book on Zen meditation too. Would want the kids to know I’m okay either way.

While packing, Antonio, my youngest, comes to me with his favorite baby books: The Bear’s Toothache, HUGS, The Giving Tree, Quiet as a Cricket, Playing Grown-Up. These are certified baby books, most of them hard books, so that babies may teethe on them too. He looks forlorn, prepared for me to say they should go in the rummage sale pile. But I have anticipated this moment and I have a book behind my back too. He puts his books on the floor, by my feet, and asks gingerly, shyly, if it would be all right to put it on his very own shelf. “Yes, you may bring all of them,” I tell him. “But you must never leave behind Goodnight Gorilla.” And I reveal the book behind my back and I smile with all the love in my heart. There remain moments in life that no great literature could ever render, I think, as he hugs me.

I wonder what judgments my children make as they look at my own library. What kind of books raised their mother, they will sometimes wonder. I am almost jealous that these books will outlive me and watch the children grow. I imagine later on when I am gone that they will find my Rumi and they will come to a dog-eared page, they will read the words that most comforted me and hopefully they too will find solace:

That’s how you came here, like a star

without a name. Move across the night sky

with those anonymous lights.

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You may reach the author at Rica.Santos@gmail.com.