Read More Books

Two years ago, we were driving to New York as midwesterners are want to do to visit my parents.  The annual trip.  Very relaxing, three kids in the car, no one unhappy (okay, so fiction has its place, stay with me) when we see right outside of Cleveland this warehouse just south of us.  And we both were silent, and staring, and silent, and those darling kids, well, to be honest we were most likely ignoring them as parents are want to do on hour six of a very long, eleven hour if you have no offspring, but seventeen hour if you are so blessed, trip.

And this warehouse.  This beautiful warehouse, windows all broken out, graffiti all decorating its upper extremities, and there in big block letters was “READ MORE BOOKS!!”.

We had to get a picture.  And we were driving 70 or so, and we pulled over but there was an off ramp, and it, well we all lived, and the kids, okay, truth be told perhaps there was some screaming prior to the mad dash, but they were pondering in their very quiet children’s voices, “What are we doing???!”.  And of course, we were trying to get a picture, because a picture had to be had.

And we missed it.

A week later heading back, we knew we’d be on the wrong side of the road but had a secret plan, secret from our children, to have me stand up, out of the sunroof going 70 miles an hour to get the picture.  The road split just before my feat of daring, and no picture was to be had.  And being a very logical, well-adjusted, mother of three, I nearly wept.

Before our trip the following year, my husband mentioned the warehouse, and that he believed they were going to demolish it.  The one bit of hope (no I do not tend toward melodrama, thankyouverymuch), a broken warehouse, graffiti everywhere, and in the story in my mind, a bunch of kids who got it.  Kids who possibly slept there, lived there who got the joke that there is hope in books, there is life in books…those kids would be out of a home.  All in my head of course.  We needed to honor them.  Their sign.  The sign that kids cared, people cared, that all the rest was bullshit, and books can in fact, save you.

For an hour nearing Cleveland, I sat with the cap off of my lens, ready, hopeful that the building would stand.  There it was.  My husband knowing me at my most rational, pulled across three lanes, and stopped the car.  In rush hour.  And I got the picture.

READ MORE BOOKS!!