scintilla day 8- BFFs forever

 Scintilla Project: Day 8. Who was your childhood best friend? (yes, I did skip 7)

When I was a child, my cousin who lived in Richmond was my best friend. We were the same age, and although she lived far away, she and her mom and sisters came to Asheville every summer to visit my aunt and grandfather. They stayed for weeks, so we got to spend lots of quality time together, and during those weeks we were inseparable. My aunt and my grandfather also went to Richmond every Thanksgiving, and always took me along. I lived for summers and Thanksgiving.

But summers and Thanksgiving were only a fraction of the year. The rest of the year, all those long months that weren’t summer break or Thanksgiving, I didn’t get to spend every waking moment with my cousin. And I was a very shy child and a very odd child – not a good combination. I was tall, I wore glasses, I had no social skills. We went to a peculiar church that didn’t allow us to do anything rambunctious or watch TV from sunset Friday until sunset Saturday, so I couldn’t participate in many school-related activities. I was very quiet and very awkward, I had horse-madness and I loved to read. All of these things made me peculiar, and I didn’t really understand how to make friends. So my cousin was my long-distance, summertime and Thanksgiving best friend. And books were my year-round best friends.

I learned to read long before I started school, and was so far ahead of my first-grade classmates that I got sent to the third grade classroom for reading. Just one more thing to make me weird! I loved reading more than, well, pretty much anything else in the world. My mother would take me to the teeny East Asheville branch of the library every week, and I’d come out with a stack of books so high I could barely carry them. And I’d read them all. I especially loved books about horses. I read all the Black Stallion books over and over and over. I read Man 0’ War, and all the My Friend Flicka books, and all the ones by Marguerite Henry – King of the Wind and Misty of Chincoteague and Brighty of the Grand Canyon and about a gazillion others (I actually did not remember that she wrote all those books – I just looked it up thanks to the miracle of Google). And I read National Velvet many many times. I also loved Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass beyond all reason (okay, I still think they are brilliant). But I think my favorite books of all were the Wizard of Oz books. There were fourteen original Oz books by L. Frank Baum, and I read every one of them, over and over and over and over. I remember my mom asking me, just a tad concerned, how many times I’d read those books and if I didn’t think maybe I should read something else for a change.

So, really, although I considered my cousin my best friend, my day-to-day best friends were books. Books didn’t care if I was shy and peculiar and wore glasses! Books thought glasses were great, actually. They look so… bookish. Books let me be whoever I wanted to be, even if who I wanted to be was a horse. Books were always there, and the library was happy to let me check out the best ones as many times as my peculiar heart desired.