LOVING BOOKS

LEARNING TO LOVE BOOKS I love books. So, so much do I love them, that I would vainly attempt to impose my love for them on others. My love for books began very early, when my mother gave me a little picture book of dinosaurs at age 4. I could not read it. But the pictures spoke to me. They totally enlarged my facile imagination and some of them scared me, thus, emotionally engaging me in their varieties. My mother also loved books like me! My next memorable book, apart from the "Fun with Dick and Jane," series in 1st grade, whereby we learned to read under Mrs. Riley, was my first library book in 2nd grade, that was borrowed from the bookmobile, our school district's mobile library, for schools without libraries, like my own James Milton Turner Elementary School in the Kirkwood, Missouri, School District. This book had a striking cover. It was titled, "ESTEVANICO, Little Stephen;" it was about the famous Spanish explorer who was killed as he and his party journeyed across the present day southwest United States, exploring and planting crosses for other, later Spaniards to follow its progress as they sought the fabled City of Gold. Estevanic was the first "European" person to do so . European is in quotation marks, because he was a black man, a Moor, who had converted from Islam to Christianity, after the military ouster of the Moors, back to Africa in 1492, by King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, of Spain. The Moors had ruled, had "civilized" Spain for over 700 years, having conquered it in 711. I intuitively learned much from this 2nd grade book, on black history, very early.