February 23, 2004
Reading
The last couple of days have been pretty mild. It's funny how I "feel" spring in the air when I walk outdoors. The breeze seems a little milder on my face. The sun seems warmer and lasts longer during the day. The weather forecaster says there is a change of snow in the middle of the week and the news doesn't sit right with me. I want winter to pack up and leave!
TB and I need new bookcases! We're being overrun by all of our books. We have books in just about every single room of our house, stacked and some hidden, some not. We filled up the bookcases we bought very quickly and have resorted to stacking books on top of books on top of more books. We just got 6 more books in the mail today.
I guess if we were going to throw our money away on something, new books would be a good thing. We are all bookworms. We all loved reading when we were little kids. I think early reading influences whether or not you read later in life. My brother, who was never a bookworm, doesn't read much more than the newspaper. I can't even begin to imagine life without a book!
Still, we do have a storage problem. I had an idea that I thought might work. As we finish our books, we could bring them to the library and donate them or maybe recycle at the used book stores. There's two problems with that, though. One is that many of these books are ones I love so much I don't want to part with them. Another is that I don't read as quickly as I used to. It would take a while to gather enough books together to make the trip worthwhile.
When I was a kid, I used to read 2 or more books a week. I practically lived at the library, pestering my parents to take me every weekend. Finally my mother got exasperated and told me to just check out 10 books so we could go just once a month. I did, but I felt library withdrawal! 
And so I began going to my school library or to the Enoch Pratt library in downtown Baltimore. It was easier to go there than to the county library out where I lived because there was a bus route right there. I couldn't drive yet.
Now maybe I read one book a month. I think it's because I have so many other distractions -- TV and computer. When I was much younger, there were no computers (imagine!) and I didn't watch TV as much as I do now.
"Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up." ~Pablo Picasso.
Children can see so many more possibilities than adults can. With a child?s imagination, anything could be possible in any shape or in any color. When you are an adult, things tend to follow some sort of order, or some kind of symmetry. Everything is supposed to make sense. Kids don?t start out with that kind of thinking. It?s something they learn when they grow up. The challenge is to be able to shake off the belief that art has to make sense and follow a certain order. Not everyone can do that and so many people just stop drawing and painting when they grow up. Some artists are able to keep the imagination and vision they had as children.
I say ? and you think ?
- Angel:: heaven
- Birth:: life
- Logic:: reason
- Stars:: sky
- Nursery:: babies
- View:: see
- Hart:: deer
- Creation:: beginning
- End:: done
- Fortune:: rich
- Identity:: me
- Reveal:: show
- Live:: die
- Attitude:: feeling
- Night:: day
- Nevada:: Las Vegas
- Weekend:: freedom
- Write:: story
- Friend:: close
- Seventeen::eighteen
Posted by Cassie at February 23, 2004 04:13 PM