MY WONDERFUL ROMANCE WITH READING

My wonderful romance with reading By Rev. Dr. Larry Delano Coleman Sunday, August 19, 2012 I love to read. Reading educates, alerts, humors, encourages, inspires, instructs, warns, admonishes, and titillates, just to name a few of it potent properties. In my Webster Groves High School English, taught by Mr. Howard Derrickson, I wrote the following words, in response to an in-class assignment on Haiku, a Japanese poetry format. As he held up a picture of a boy, lying upon a hillside, reading a book, under a tree, I wrote: “Here I lay all day. Yet, the dusts of many distant lands cake my feet.” This 17-syllable “Haiku” assignment personified, then and now, my romance with reading. Reading, and its corollary, writing, was aesthetic and synesthetic, engaging other senses. The twain was also liberating, adventurous, empowering and emboldening! My mother gave me the first book that I can recall when I was 4. It was full of colorful pictures of reptiles and dinosaurs. I could not read it, of course. But, its imagery transported me to other places, times and climes. That I can remember it now, almost 60 years later, attests to its enduring, imaginative impact. In the second grade, I was permitted to check out my first book from our “bookmobile,” a motorized library that serviced James Milton Turner Elementary School in Meacham Park/Kirkwood, Missouri. That book was “Estevanico, Little Stephen” the 16th century Spanish conquistador/explorer, of African descent, who had first explored the southwestern region of the present-day United States of America , seeking the fabled cities of gold, the Seven Cities of Cibola. He never found them. Instead, he was found by some Indians who had tracked the crosses he left behind as markers, and murdered him and his entire party. Why I picked that one book, instead of another, speaks to my socialization and to my upbringing. I have never been ashamed of myself nor of my people. Neither, by reason thereof, was I ever intimidated by any book involving such subject matter, nor any other. The world, indeed, the universe-- along with all time, space, matter and force--was an open flower to be sniffed and inhaled deeply and frequently.