It's Always Been Reading and Writing For Me

My parents came to visit me for 4th of July weekend.

Whenever they come to New York they always come with a car full of stuff, mostly the results of the Costco trip my dad takes for me since I rarely find myself with time for that particular errand. This makes me lucky. I know that for sure.

This time, along with a massive bottle of olive oil, a huge container of strawberries and a 6-pack of hearts of romaine, came four boxes of my stuff that had, until this past weekend, been residing in my parent's basement. The boxes were mostly filled with school books from my various high school, college and law school classes, but there were some gems to be found as well.

Like the shoe-box filled with ticket stubs, letters and various other mementos from my college days. Or the pictures of a much younger me with various grandparents. Or the ketubah from my wedding which is actually not so much a gem as it is a really, really important document that I thought I lost, which would be very, very bad.

And buried among all those things was this book I wrote when I was eleven. I had forgotten all about it, and I still can't remember the exact circumstances under which it was written and bound, but when I dug through the boxes, there it was, wedged between a Constitutional Law textbook and a well worn copy of Huckleberry Finn for tenth grade English.

And in the front cover I wrote an inscription to myself, starting off with the phrase "I love to read!" Which I did. And I do.

I don't often think of myself when I was little, but every time I do, I get a comforting reminder of how the me that I am today was grown from the me that I was back then. It's not an accident that I turned out to be exactly who I am. It's been more than twenty years since I wrote that little book and the inscription on the inside cover, but barely anything has changed. It's still reading and writing for me, and I think, somehow, that it always will be.