Clearly, “Oh! Oh! Oh! Look! Look! Look! See Spot run!” had brought no purging of pity and fear. At least I didn’t know I was reading books. In which case I didn’t recognize the thing I was doing in school as reading. More likely, when I brought the unfamiliar book home from the library I must have already been in first grade. Could I have possibly begun reading spontaneously? More than three-quarters-of-a-century later, that memory still surprises me. Where this new power, this power that opened new books, came from I had no idea. I’d been “reading” my lamb book for a long time, but only because I had memorized every word. I hadn’t realized until that moment that I could do such a thing! and to my absolute astonishment began to read. She was busy doing mother things and my impatience grew.įinally, reluctantly, I opened the unwanted book. Once home, I sat on the couch in our four-room mill house and waited impatiently for my mother to read the new book to me. I can feel the shape and heft of it in my hands today. Small and square with an anonymously rebound cover. Nonetheless, I left the library that day with a different book. I can still feel their hovering presence, hear their murmuring voices telling me that another book would do. My mother and the librarian stood over me, talking, talking. I had never dreamed such a tragedy possible. The day came, both inevitable and entirely unexpected, when my mother and I climbed the musty stairs to the library over the city clerk’s office to find my beloved lamb book gone from the shelf.

Here’s another story about that same small-town library, that same book. And when I did, every single time I did, I experienced a truly Aristotelian purging of pity and fear. To bring back even his cheerful pink fuzz. The same grief I would experience many years later when King Lear thundered onto a stage carrying the dead Cordelia.Įven as I grieved my lamb’s lost mother, though, I knew I could choose, that soon I would choose, to turn the page.

Even the pettable pink fuzz vanished.Īgain and again, I stroked the smooth gray lamb on the smooth gray page, grieving. The gray lamb stood alone at the top of a gray hill. The fuzzy, pink lamb lost his mother, the moment of loss made more terrible by all color draining away at the turn of the page. Mostly, though, I remember the loss at the story’s heart. The tips of my fingers remember that pink fuzz. Pale blue with a fuzzy pink lamb cavorting across it. That book lives in me still, and I am 82. But the small size didn’t matter to me, because every time my mother and I went to the library, I brought home the same book. The children’s section formed an open cube, perhaps six feet on each side. It was a small town and an even smaller library.

Made marion books