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I don't remember my parents telling me stories or reading me stories when I was little. Not that I blame them, you understand; I taught myself to read when I was three and ever since then I've taken care of finding for myself as many stories as possible.
And it's not as if my childhood was completely devoid of the usual fairy tales and assorted fantasies: as a relatively early part of the generation raised on not just televisions but VCRs, I had at my fingertips cartoons, sing-a-longs, and most of the Disney videos of the day, in those big soft white plastic cases.
I know I had similar children's stories in books as well, of course, but I barely remember those. The first thing I really remember about books is something that happened to me in kindergarten: my class had just returned from our weekly trip to the library and my teacher noticed that while most kids had Bernstein Bears books or other picture books, I had a book on astronomy. She said something like, "Oh, you don't really want that one, do you?" I frowned in confusion. Now I imagine she was either trying to save me the frustration of a book so far above my age's reading level, or she was just being mean (my kindergarten teacher was mean! she's being mean to my mom, who works with her, now). But at the time I had no idea what she was talking about. Of course I wanted that book! It looked great.
In elementary school I read the handful of books the school library had on the subject, over and over. I read them on the hour-long bus ride home, I stayed up late with them (of course, I did these things with all my books ... come to think of it, I'm really no different now, am I?). I happily lost myself in notions of exotic oceans and skies, in phrases like "mean distance from the Sun", which I thought sounded great even before I knew what they meant. And of course there were all those mysteries, so many things unknown not just to elementary school students, but to everyone. The number of moons on Saturn's page of statistics had a question mark after it! Even after I turned off the lights, my mind would whirl in the stunning weirdness and crazy mysteries, astronomical units away.
I would move on to other fascinations as I got older. A future in science aws not meant for one so terrible at math, I've come to believe; my laziness and general confusion are surely the hallmarks of an arts or humanitites student. But I still read books about astronomy; I watch the shows about it when they're on TV, sure they must be better than anything else that's on, even if I don't hear anything I didn't already know.
Anyway, it's nearly impossible for any such collection of facts not to contain something I hadn't known or didn't remember or had never thought about in quite that way before. And even when I'm just hearing again that Uranus rotates on its side or that Galileo thought Saturn had ears, it kind of makes me smile, it makes me feel good. These somehow ended up being the stories of my childhood.
And it's not as if my childhood was completely devoid of the usual fairy tales and assorted fantasies: as a relatively early part of the generation raised on not just televisions but VCRs, I had at my fingertips cartoons, sing-a-longs, and most of the Disney videos of the day, in those big soft white plastic cases.
I know I had similar children's stories in books as well, of course, but I barely remember those. The first thing I really remember about books is something that happened to me in kindergarten: my class had just returned from our weekly trip to the library and my teacher noticed that while most kids had Bernstein Bears books or other picture books, I had a book on astronomy. She said something like, "Oh, you don't really want that one, do you?" I frowned in confusion. Now I imagine she was either trying to save me the frustration of a book so far above my age's reading level, or she was just being mean (my kindergarten teacher was mean! she's being mean to my mom, who works with her, now). But at the time I had no idea what she was talking about. Of course I wanted that book! It looked great.
In elementary school I read the handful of books the school library had on the subject, over and over. I read them on the hour-long bus ride home, I stayed up late with them (of course, I did these things with all my books ... come to think of it, I'm really no different now, am I?). I happily lost myself in notions of exotic oceans and skies, in phrases like "mean distance from the Sun", which I thought sounded great even before I knew what they meant. And of course there were all those mysteries, so many things unknown not just to elementary school students, but to everyone. The number of moons on Saturn's page of statistics had a question mark after it! Even after I turned off the lights, my mind would whirl in the stunning weirdness and crazy mysteries, astronomical units away.
I would move on to other fascinations as I got older. A future in science aws not meant for one so terrible at math, I've come to believe; my laziness and general confusion are surely the hallmarks of an arts or humanitites student. But I still read books about astronomy; I watch the shows about it when they're on TV, sure they must be better than anything else that's on, even if I don't hear anything I didn't already know.
Anyway, it's nearly impossible for any such collection of facts not to contain something I hadn't known or didn't remember or had never thought about in quite that way before. And even when I'm just hearing again that Uranus rotates on its side or that Galileo thought Saturn had ears, it kind of makes me smile, it makes me feel good. These somehow ended up being the stories of my childhood.