We go to literature to be changed. -- Maggie Smith I was taken captive by a book last week. I tried to resist. Every couple of hours I turned off the light and closed my eyes, but sleep would not come. The book kept whispering to me. When I squeezed my eyelids tighter, the whispers grew louder. I thought a few more pages would satisfy the whisperer and tire me out, but no! At 5 AM, I closed the cover on the last page and then lay in the light of early dawn savoring what I had consumed. I was tired the rest of the day, but I had no regrets. The story still stirs in me today. Language is a miracle. And so is the power to read and to write. It is a gift I would like to give to everyone. It is the rich inheritance I leave to my daughter who is a reader too. When you are a reader your life and your thinking are shaped by a chorus of voices, of possibilities that give flexibility to thoughts and points of view. Words change us. Yes, they have the power to harm, but more often, they teach us and guide us and heal us, and sometimes they save us too. Words on a page are a commitment. Handwritten, or printed and published, there is no turning back. A writer exposes and is exposed making writing an act of bravery. Committed words on a page encourage us to speak and to speak up. And it takes perseverance to write a book and to read one. Mariann Edgar Budde wrote that perseverance is the hidden virtue of every courageous life. Rarely do we see what it costs others to do what seems effortless to us. Books heal shame and give hope when we read of the perseverance of others. We find pathways and solutions and people like us. We know that if another endured that, than we can endure this. Through words we live more fully in the here and now even as we relive the past and enter the future. Books open another person’s heart and mind, and we peek inside. In doing so, we see our own lives more clearly; we understand the impact of history, circumstances, and choices on people, on ourselves. It makes us wiser and more forgiving. Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote: I was made for the library, not the classroom. The classroom was a jail of other people’s interests; the library was open, unending, free. I was not much for school either, but give me the library any day. And it is at the library that words are gathered, categorized and catalogued. Words are there to serve us. Someone left their words behind so that we might go forward smarter, more thoughtful and better prepared, changed by examination and re-examination. We find words to grow into and words that expand our own web of knowledge. There is meaning and purpose on the shelves. Our own lives are faced as we explore the lives of others and the knowledge they accumulated. Books are good friends to me. Each fits into my own story and speaks to me at a particular moment in my life, a particular stage of my own development. Some friends were with me at the beginning, some as the plot thickened, and I know that some will accompany me for the entire ride. Each of our lives is a storybook in progress. Everything that we see, hear and experience is stored in memory, the bookshelf of the mind. Hope and worry are make-believe stories we tell ourselves. Grief and pride are what we feel when a chapter ends. When we lose memory, individually or collectively, that is how we are erased. Books and good writing comfort me in these difficult times. I marvel and give thanks that there continue to be so many gifted writers, so many wonderful books. As Thomas Jefferson said, “I cannot live in a world without books,” and I thank the forefathers for our library system. And I want to thank Dr. Seuss for teaching me to read with words and rhymes that tickled my mind and my imagination. And a thank you to Nancy Drew for making me a page turner and introducing me to chapter books and the pride of reading a “big” book, and for showing me that girls born in the 1950s could be smart and do interesting things, live adventurous lives. Reading a book is a private experience with public consequences. It requires effort and introspection unlike the loudspeaker of social media contrived to fill us with outrage in order to sell advertising. I have read that the ultimate freedom is to imagine and think for ourselves. That is the foundation of democracy. When we read, we are reminded of how much we have in common. The Republic of Imagination is a country we can all believe in. On the worst days the state of the country and the world seem hopeless, and then I read a wonderful book or hear the lyrics to a beautiful song, and I think: that came from inside someone’s mind, someone’s heart, and it gives me hope that hatred and careless people will not get the last word. So, please, let's tell a new story.
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 Such is the magic of Christmas in childhood… that a single gift can provide one with endless hours of adventure while not even requiring one to leave one’s house. Amor Towles in A Gentleman in Moscow With so much attention on the November election and its potential aftermath, it is hard to believe that the holiday season is not far away. I am doing some light research in case the Christmas miracle is that we do have Christmas this year. What launched my study was a mailing from a large chain store. I received its holiday gift guide, a slender 35-page catalog that I found in a flimsy roll in my four-inch-wide-apartment-sized mailbox. My inner child scoffed at the sight. Talk about shrinkflation! I grew up with the Sears catalog, a compendium of anywhere from 322 to 1,000 pages. I am going to guess that it weighed about half of whatever I did, and it required two hands and a baby brother to lift it into my lap. While it felt disrespectful to Sears and to Christmas wishing, in general, to even consider the flyer a Christmas catalog, I took it to my apartment and smoothed it out on my desktop. I studied the cover. Festive holiday colors formed the backdrop while the featured cover items were some of the classics that have stood the test of time: Barbie dolls, Transformers, and fisher-price Little People. The child in me forced my hand, and I turned the pages. The first page featured gifts “under $10.” There were only nine items in this price category including a Play-Doh Swirln’ Smoothies Toy Blender. Wow! I would have sold my sister for that. Still might. The second page featured items “under $20” and included the classic Lite-Brite. But beyond page two, there were no prices listed as I found myself at a two-page spread for Lego. Perhaps the price tags were missing because today’s parents already know they will need to apply for a mortgage and provide the bank with the credentials of the builder. Curious, I turned to Google for a price check. Most of the Lego sets were priced at $99.99 or more, some topping $499.00. When I was growing up, I could have purchased my first car with that amount of dough and it would have come assembled. Flabbergasted, I moved on to the next pages where my beloved Barbie had been given a two-page spread with similar displays for Disney and fisher-price. Deeper into the catalog, I smiled at the pages of familiar board games many of which still line my closet shelves. The classics still in my possession are also still in the game of games: Clue, Life, Monopoly, Operation, Sorry, Trouble, and the ancient Battleship. I shouldn’t have been surprised, but Nerf had an entire page devoted to its guns. They have gotten much larger and more varied. Nerf now makes a machine-gun named the X-shot Insanity Motorized Rage Fire Blaster. Just keeping up with the times…Rage and insanity, the name says it all. After that bit of discouragement, I rejoiced to find that the arts have not gone out of style. There were pages of craft kits with more Play-Doh items, Crayola products, and the ancient Spirograph. Even a few books were featured on page 27. I was all the way to page 29 of the 35 pages before holiday tech made an appearance: lots of dull-looking headphones, controllers, and keyboards. All-in-all this slim catalog didn’t stink, but it sure did shrink. It made me wonder what has happened to the magnitude of our wishes and the enormity of our gratitude. When I was a child we wished hard and expected little. We hoped something special would arrive by sleigh. We marked just about everything in the book in hopes of getting one item that we prized. Our minds got a workout just by looking and imagining. I closed the catalog filled with mixed emotions: the old joy I felt as a child along with the sadness of wondering what has happened to childhood and imagination in the age of technology and AI. I saw into a future in which the human mind becomes as flabby and diabetic as our bodies did in the age of conveniences. I don’t think I ever realized how much our young minds grew just from imagining what we could do, what we would do. And then, after the present arrived, what we did do: all of those hours of Barbie dramas, Erector sets, coloring books, Play-Doh, improvisation, playing games, learning rules, taking turns, it all amounted to something. Now, at this stage of my life, the thing I prize most is my mind, the one that grew from all of that wishing, imagining and playing. But then came the October surprise. About a week after receiving the catalog, a coworker reported that her nine-year-old daughter watched an old-time detective show on television. The child was fascinated by the lack of technology and the way the investigators used their minds to solve the case. “I want to do that!” she said in awe. Awe and ah! A Christmas miracle in October! I plan to give her the Christmas catalog and show her how it’s done.  When I was in third grade we had a special program at school one day. It was about telephones. Not all students had phones in their homes. This class intended to introduce children to the rotary telephone. We practiced placing calls, answering calls, and basic telephone etiquette. In addition to the proper words to say in greeting, we had to have some lessons on polite use of a party line. Back then not everyone had a private telephone line. Some had shared service. A person might pick up the phone to dial and find that there were other folks already talking on the line. Of course, the courteous thing to do was hang up. There were other more interesting options such as joining in the conversation or silently gathering intel on fellow citizens, hence the special lesson. No mother wanted some eight-year-old smarty-pants eavesdropping and dishing dirt on the neighbors. This telephone education curriculum was put together by Bell Telephone, THE telephone company. Each student was provided with a thin booklet explaining the history of the telephone and discussing potential advances. The information in the booklet described a future in which callers would be able to see each other while talking on the phone. A sketch was provided of a large desktop phone with a small square screen. That seemed far-fetched, like having a television in your phone! Even a few years later, we found it silly when the bumbling spy, Agent Maxwell Smart, made calls from his wrist…the old wrist phone trick…on the show Get Smart. It was unimaginable that a wrist phone would be in our future or that one day we would carry a palm-sized phone in our pockets that would do computing, face time, GPS, games, and movie streaming. There have been other unimaginable events that have actually occurred in my lifetime. I remember overhearing the conversations of adults after Dr. Christian Barnard completed the first heart transplant in South Africa in 1967. Unimaginable! And was it ethical? Would this really be allowed to go on? People feared that they would be struck over the head and dragged off to some dark alley where black market organ traders would rip out the hearts of the unsuspecting and leave them for dead. No one could have imagined a time such as now when 3500 hearts would be transplanted in a single year or that other organs would be harvested to save lives. And all of this is done in hospitals with sterile surgical technique. Many of us know or live with someone who has had an organ transplant. People are casually asked at the BMV about their desire to donate. No black market, just long lines. And no longer inconceivable or scandalous. In 1969 I watched on a black and white television screen as the first man walked on the moon. Eleven others have done it since then in living color. As I write this, private entrepreneurs are preparing for tourist travel in space. Our children will go to school with other children whose parents and grandparents have walked on the moon, and in the future, our kids may travel in space on spring break. People are already signing up. No longer unbelievable. What once we could only imagine has now become ordinary. We’ve grown accustomed to our technology and the speed of change. We don’t imagine, we expect new and futuristic products to roll off the line with frequency. We seem to have the ability to create and prepare for the things we can imagine. (Although I am still waiting for the Maxwell Smart shoe phone. Sorry about that, Chief.) Now faced with a virus that has the power to take us back in time to the Middle Ages, it is mind-boggling to realize that our best remedy is as simple, as difficult, and as low-tech as staying home. It seems like a Stone Age intervention leaving some people incredulous, angry, impatient, and unbelieving. Perhaps, in the long process from rotary phones to iphones, from automobiles to aerospace travel, we have become smug and lost our regard for the past and what it has to teach us. We failed to plan and to prepare—to imagine and to believe. |
AuthorLilli-ann Buffin Archives
August 2026
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