For The Love of Reading

As Carolina is learning to read, I'm rediscovering books from my childhood.

Carolina reading to her stuffies.

A few months into first grade, my daughter came home and declared, "I hate reading."

That wasn't a true reflection of how she felt. She loved stories but hated the required reading in class and this new thing she had to do each night—homework. Weeknights brought frustration, often accompanied by tears, until we met Greg Heffley.

Greg is the main character in the Diary of a Wimpy Kid series. It's not exactly first-grade reading material, but that's what made it so compelling. It was a glimpse into what the cool kids—the 5th graders—were talking about. Laying side by side on her pillow, we made a deal. I'd read the pages if she read the captions of the illustrations.

Splat! Woosh. Plop. She was hooked.

At first, she recognized some of the words I was reading: the, every, what, and how. She worked hard this year. Now, as the school year winds down, something beautiful has happened. She's fallen in love with reading and, amazingly, can now read Diary of a Wimpy Kid all by herself.

These days, Carolina reads with a flashlight under the covers long after she's been tucked in. She reads in the elevator. On the subway. Walking down the street. She reads at the breakfast table. She reads the way I did when I was little: completely transported.

Reading in the elevator.

Her love of books has become an invitation for me to revisit some of my childhood favorites. We came across a copy of From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler in a Little Free Library.

"Holy cow, Carolina! This was one of my FAVORITE books! You'll never believe what it's about. These two kids from Connecticut run away from home and hide out at The Met."

She put her fingers to her forehead and flicked them outward with a, "Pshhh!"

Mind blown.

Finding a book in the book box with Dad’s name on it.

I read the book in third grade, but the story is simple enough for a first-grader to follow, so we've been reading it together at night. It’s about Claudia and her little brother Jamie, who run away from home—not because anything terrible happened, but because Claudia doesn't feel appreciated for all that she does for her family—like emptying the family's wastepaper baskets. She devises an escape plan and enlists Jamie for company and funding. They board a train to New York City and hide out at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The cover of From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler.

Rereading the book has unlocked a drawer of dusty memories I didn't know I still had. I remembered how cool it seemed that Claudia and Jamie stood on toilet seats in stalls to avoid being caught by the museum guards at night. I thought that if I ever needed money, I could do what they did—collect coins tossed into museum fountain by tourists. I loved their passion for solving a mystery about a statute that might—or might not—have been sculpted by Michelangelo.

When I first read the book, I'm not sure I'd ever been to The Met. But Carolina has been there countless times, and knows it inside and out. She visits almost every week with her Dad, my husband. When we all visit together, she takes the lead often making a beeline for her favorite section where the Temple of Dendur and the mummies reside and where Claudia and Jamie spent a lot of time in the story.

The other night, we were reading about how the kids bathed in the fountain, and we had to look up whether the location they described existed. Neither of us could recall where it was.

It turns out that it did exist, but it is now long gone.

The original Fountain of the Muses, which now resides in South Carolina.

While searching for images for this post, I learned that the inspiration for the book came from a single piece of popcorn the author, E. L. Konigsburg, saw at The Met.

“My three children and I were visiting the Museum, wandering through the period rooms on the first floor when I spotted a single piece of popcorn on the seat of a blue silk chair. There was a velvet rope across the doorway of the room. How had that lonely piece of popcorn arrived on the seat of that blue silk chair? Had someone sneaked in one night—it could not have happened during the day—slipped behind the barrier, sat in that chair, and snacked on popcorn? For a long time after leaving the Museum that day, I thought about that piece of popcorn on the blue silk chair and how it got there.

…my family went on vacation to Yellowstone National Park. One day we went on a picnic. …we came to a clearing in the woods, I suggested that we eat there. We all crouched slightly above the ground and spread out our meal. Then the complaints began. The chocolate milk was getting warm, and there were ants all over everything, and the sun was melting the icing on the cupcakes. This was hardly roughing it, and yet my small group could think of nothing but the discomfort.

If they ever wanted to run away, where would they go?

Certainly, they would never consider a place less civilized than their suburban home. They would want all those conveniences plus a few extra dashes of luxury. Probably, they wouldn’t consider a place even a smidgen less elegant than The Metropolitan Museum of Art. That is when I started thinking about hiding in the Museum. They could hide there if they found a way to escape the guards and left no traces—no popcorn on chairs—no traces at all.” —E. L. Konigsburg

I remember how much this book taught me—about being resourceful, outsmarting grown-ups, and falling in love with New York City. I love that Carolina is experiencing this book in a way I didn't because of her familiarity with the museum. Reading it together has been like opening a time capsule I didn't know I had buried. We turn the pages slowly, reading only a chapter a night because neither of us wants the story to end.

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Words of the Week

“One of the greatest adventures in life is to know something that nobody else knows. Something that makes you different, where it really counts: inside yourself.” — Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler

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Photo of the Week

A bee at the West Side Community Garden.

This week, I was early for a meeting and rather than showing up, waiting, and scrolling on my phone I popped into the West Side Community Garden and took a moment to appreciate the beauty of raindrops on flowers. I spent about a minute waiting for his bee to emerge (which it did, backwards) to capture this image. I love that we live in a time where the phone in our pocket can take such a detailed macro image.

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