Anna from The Particular Ordinary posts this challenge, which she co-sponsors:

Describe an event in your growing up that changed you. [That’s rather broad, so let’s make it tougher] It has to be something personal, something that you know will never happen to you again.

It’s no secret that I read a lot. I always have. There’s a kind of magic in words on a page, in plot and character, that transports me to all sorts of places. Through books, I’ve been in the night kitchen with Mickey, sipped tea with Mr. Tumnus, cried over Beth’s death (and later, over Jo refusing Laurie’s proposal), and been as faithful as Watson about following Holmes’s explanations. So you might think that the one moment that most affected my life was the one in which I first connected the sounds to the squiggly lines of type, first actually read. The thing is, I don’t remember that moment. I don’t even remember the process, or remember how old I was when pretending to read, while looking at picture books, became actual reading.

I do, however, remember the moment in which I learned just how far outside the real world I could travel, helped by books.

It was sometime in early fall of 1977. I was seven years old, and missing my two front teeth, and after about a month at school in Golden, Colorado, we’d moved to the tiny mountain town of Georgetown, home of cute houses, and even cuter shops, and often used as a movie backdrop. I was being thrust into yet another new school, but at seven, this was more an adventure for me, than the annoyance changing schools would later become.

I don’t remember the series of events that led to my placement as the only second-grader in a fourth-grade reading class, but I do remember that a girl named Dina (or Deena?) was assigned to show me around. The order of the day was to select a book from the school library, and read quietly, so Dina (it’s shorter than Deena, even if it’s wrong), showed me the library, and introduced me to the librarian, who impressed me so little that I don’t remember the person’s gender, let alone their name.

I was reading the Little House… books that year, and so I selected the first in the series that I hadn’t yet read: On the Banks of Plum Creek. I don’t know how long I read, or what went on around me, I just know that I opened the book and began reading about Laura and Mary exploring their new home in a dugout – I marvel now at how large LIW made a dugout sound – having actually SEEN such a house, I’m amazed that anyone would be able to tolerate more than an hour in such a place.

I’d gotten to the point in the book where Laura and Mary manipulate Nellie into wading into the section of the creek where the leeches live, and then the external world broke through the bubble of my imagination, and I realized I’d read through the whole class, and part of the next. I was new, so no one had noticed.

It was the first time I learned that it was possible to virtually hide in a book, and it was knowledge that would serve me well over the next three years.

I don’t talk about it much – practically never, really – but I’ve never met my biological father. He and my mother never married, despite lobbying by both sets of parents, and he was never part of my life. My mother’s first husband was incredibly abusive. I don’t remember details, just constant tension and fear, with flashes of details – my name spoken in a certain tone of voice freaks me out, beige classic VW Beetles make me want to hide, and I remember the flash of light glinting off a child-sized baton that I had, as he raised it to hit my mother, and later, as my mother and I were leaving for the last time, his voice as he took me aside and hissed that someday he’d hunt me down and kill me. I’ve moved past that time, for the most part, and don’t care to relive the details – there were good memories from those years, and I prefer to dwell on them.

But the thing that saved my sanity was the ability to completely lose track of reality, while reading, the trick I learned when I was seven.

When my mother and J. would fight, screaming matches followed by slammed doors, and days of tension, and sometimes physical fights, I’d retreat to the bottom bunk of my bunk beds, close the curtains I’d attached to the side, turn on a flashlight suspended from the far support, and read myself to someplace safe and happy. The Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew were my rescuers more often than I care to count, but I often immersed myself in the classics too. In my head, I chatted with Jane Eyre over bowls of stew, or snuck through the forest with Hawkeye.

It took several years for me to feel entirely safe and settled, and getting lost in books continued to be my source of security. At ten, I shared tomato sandwiches with Harriet M. Welsh (from whom I adopted the habit of ALWAYS using my middle initial), at twelve, I mocked Arthur Dent with Zaphod Beeblebrox, and at eighteen after a rough exam, I played chess on a sailboat with a soulful Russian called Solarin.

These days, escapist reading is a more casual comfort, done for pleasure, and not to hide from anything scarier than cramps, or a bad cold, but sometimes I still have these reading-zen moments where reality is totally non-existant and I’m literally lost in a good book. I suspect one of the reasons I loved Jasper Fforde’s Thursday Next series is because his heroine is doing (in her reality), what I’ve only been able to do via my imagination.

I barely made it to Curves on Friday, I thought, since they close at noon, and I didn’t get there until 11:32 AM, but apparently the noon thing is a guideline, at this Curves, and not a hard and fast rule. It must be nice to have a hobby business, and love your job that much.

At any rate, I didn’t feel well, and I was so concerned about staying upright, because I was congested and sinussy, that it was 2/3 of the way through my workout before I realized that they were playing the Christian workout music I’d read about on a chat board. Now, I believe that people should have the right to listen to whatever they want, but I have to admit that if I’d been feeling at all normal, I’d have requested different music, and, because these women are all pretty nice, they wouldn’t have cared, and everyone would have been happy.

But I wasn’t feeling well, and so I finished my workout, while listening to this pumped-up praise with a combined reaction of being amused and being appalled.

The song that amused me most has a lyric that goes “Shine, Jesus, Shine,” and as I was doing my last set on the abductor/adductor machine, I was seeing these images in my head of a Jesus-figure doing a Windex commercial. “For cleanliness that is truly divine…”

The song that appalled me most was their treatment of “Amazing Grace,” a song that I really love, and that has personal importance to me. I goggled at the radio, and reflected that this is why I don’t like Christian pop and Christian rock. It’s not the message of the music I have the largest issue with, it’s that setting Amazing Grace to a dance beat ruins the impact of the song, turns it into just another catchy tune, with no deep spirituality at all. (Incidentally, I feel the same way about cursing. When you use words like “fuck” in normal conversation, you diminish the power of strong language. You eliminate the shock value.)

Still, I finished my workout laughing, because, really, you haven’t lived til you’ve had the experience of doing crunches to the tune of “What A Friend We Have in Jesus” done in 11/4 time with a disco beat.

Today for the first time my mother sounded like an old woman on the phone. She isn’t actually old, having just turned 55 on Monday, but she’s sick, and sounded frail and weak and small, and the sound of her voice, usually so vibrant, but today, pathetic, is haunting me.

I find myself distracted by frightening thoughts of my mother someday living with us.

Some day in the far far far future, and only when we’ve run out of the necessary funds to keep her in a lounge chair on the beach with hardbodied young men bringing her margaritas every hour, as is her mostly-in-jest wish.

I’ve been musing on stories I want to write, but I can’t quite get them from my brain to my fingers.

I have an article I want to write, and I can’t focus enough to sit down and do it.

Last night, I stayed up til five, watching the lightening and counting the seconds until the thunder, as if the counting was a measure of my life.

Today, I’ve been in a sort of sleepy fog, flitting between tasks, but not settling to any of them.

My irises (brought home by Fuzzy on his last trip to the grocery store) are starting to curl, as if they know I’ve been reflecting upon mortality today.

The mums and carnations from valentines day remain smugly intact, their intense colors dragging me back from my more morbid thoughts.

My muse is silent these days, so I’m offering instead a picture of a pair of Frye boots I’m lusting after…I could never actually WEAR them, as I’m far too short to wear tall boots, but I’m lusting after them anyway.

(I’m also cross-posting this to the new shoe_whores community on LiveJournal.)

I think it’s the move to Texas that has put boots on my brain, really.

…that when I did the meme that determined my Secret Ya-Ya Name, the response was “Empress Shops-Too-Much.” I earned the title today, as I am now the proud new owner of:

4 new bras (with a smaller band size, yay)
10 pairs of spiffy new panties (some with butterflies)
One pink wristwatch – I hate pink, except when I’m in a kitschy mood.
A rice cooker.
A vibrant blue tea kettle that WHISTLES
And a Creative Zen Micro mp3 player, the last limited edition model at the Fry’s in Arlington (the LE’s come with an extra battery).

Oh, and Fuzzy bought a book and two new mice.

But admit it, you’re all stuck on the bit about the panties, aren’t you?

I’ve been re-reading Diane Ackerman’s book A Natural History of the Senses, and this morning in the bathroom I got to the part where she discusses color, and mentions that many of the artists we think of as great, Degas, Monet, Chegall, Van Gogh, may have painted in their disctinctive fashions because they had various issues with their vision. I nodded as I read this because to me it makes perfect sense. After all, I explained to my doctor, post-LASIK, that seeing halos and starburts around streetlights doesn’t bother me, because I’ve ALWAYS seen such things, either because my myopic eyes blurred things, or because light was refracting off the edges of glasses or contacts.

* * * * *

Ackerman mentioned that when you’re nearsighted red is usually the best-defined color. It’s always been a favorite of mine, but after some analysis I can confirm that the red I remember is more vivid than the red I see now, as if sharpening definition in all things has muted the vibrancy of the fiery colors.

She also says that not everyone perceives color the same way, which I’ve always known, but never really had the urge to poll people about. I know that to my grandmother everything from pastel orchid to vibrant plum was “lavender” and that my husband is color blind, but there’s a part of me that wishes to be able to see through their eyes, just for a moment, so that the next time I tell Fuzzy “get my green shirt,” instead of becoming fussy when he brings one that is definitely teal, I’ll be able to describe the color in a way he can understand.

* * * * *

Reading about color and light and the process of vision always makes me think of Sunday in the Park with George.

* * * * *

After several days of sun-drenched “California Weather” the Metroplex has been experiencing cool damp greystuff. Yesterday the cloud cover was thick and silver-grey, and while I wasn’t aware of any actual rain, the mist seemed active and alive at times. I wore red to counteract the lack of sun.

Today thick grey clouds cover much of the sky, but brief holes of blue are appearing now and then, though they are very quickly swallowed up by more flowing greystuff. I am wearing soft lavender, and feeling very much like I want to blend with the clouds and not stand out from them. It’s a serene sort of feeling, borne aloft by the balmy breeze. Perfect for a Sunday.

After visiting Home Depot, Fry’s and Best Buy, I am now the proud owner of a cd rack that is less than one third full. Clearly, I need more cd’s. This is not a hint that people should SEND me cd’s but title and artist recommendations are hereby solicited. I’ll listen to almost anything, except rap and polka music.

* * * * *

I’ve re-re-arranged my office, putting some things back in their original spots and leaving others in the spots I created for them earlier this week. (I realize this means less than nothing as I never post pictures of my office. If the camera wasn’t all the way downstairs, I’d rectify that. No, really.)

* * * * *

We are also the proud owners of a guerilla gorilla ladder, a multi-positional thing that extends to 21 feet. (Fuzzy was going to buy an eight-foot ladder, until I pointed out that our living room and entry are two stories tall, and have chandeliers suspended from the ceiling, that hang higher than ten feet.) Apparently this ladder can be leaned against a wall, be used by two people at the same time, and can be reconfigured as a 3.5 foot tall scaffold (some additional parts required). Whatever. All I care about is that it is tall enough that we can change the lightbulbs in the afore-mentioned chandeliers. And so, for the first time since we moved into this house, in October , the living room light is ON, and tomorrow the entry chandelier will have six working lightbulbs instead of only two, thus allowing us to see the entry we never use (since we come and go via the garage, and only Company uses the front door). And yes, I actually did pause to go count the bulbs in the chandelier.

* * * * *

For the first time in over a month, I also have new books. I’ve got Foucault’s Pendulum and Baudolino by Umberto Eco. The first is one I’ve read, but my incredibly thick hardbound copy has gone missing, so I picked up a paperback version. I bought a Dallas Planting Guide, so I know what plants I can best keep alive in the back yard, and a couple of softer novels. Check out my reading blog in a few days for the titles and mini-reviews. (I’m woefully behind on posting there, and have promised myself I’ll catch up this week.)

* * * * *

I have to say that I love the low-carb selections at Fridays, even if they do tend to get a bit overzealous about adding cheese to things. If you ever eat there, ask for half the cheese – you won’t miss the extra, and you’ll be able to actually taste the meat. Also the totally not-diet-friendly Vanilla Bean Cheesecake is TO DIE FOR.
And Steven L., our waiter tonight at the Fridays in Arlington, totally rocks. Helpful, funny, and really on the ball. We tipped him extra.

* * * * *

It’s past 2 in the morning, and the dogs are telling me it’s bedtime. Maybe tomorrow I’ll post something remotely interesting. Or not.

Frustration is spending half the day (well, maybe half an hour) rearranging all the furniture in your office, in order to accomodate an additional printer, only to realize that in your benadryl haze you forgot to account for the USB cables that must connect both the new and old printer to the actual computer.

Bigger frustration comes when you move everything back, and realize that won’t work either.

Guess who’s shopping for uber-long cables tomorrow?

Guess who’s trying to figure out how come she has FEWER electronic devices to account for, the same amount of furniture she had in San Jose, and is mysteriously lacking enough surface space.

On a brighter note, guess who absolutely loved Dan “Homer Simpson” Castelleneta in tonight’s episode of Stargate SG1?

I promised an OD friend that I would write about my favorite tea shop. This is it.

When I was very young, coffee was a tablespoon or so of my mother’s brew, mixed in with my milk, and tea was limited to mild herbal infusions like Celestial Seasonings Sleepytime or Pelican Punch, the latter a children’s tea laced with cinnamon and carob – sort of a loose precursor to chai – but not.

It wasn’t until I was fourteen or so that I switched to black teas, and was allowed real coffee, though the latter habit wasn’t actively encouraged til I was much older. Well, a little older. When I was sixteen my mother and I would, almost every Sunday, hit the fabric store, to feed her addiction, the library, to feed mine, and our favorite café, where we’d linger over strawberry and sweet cream cheese croissants and strong lattes.

I loved coffee, loved the romance of the bitter black brew, fancying myself to be Jo March writing home from New York, where she first met Professor Bhaer, or Anna Hastings (from Allen Drury’s novels) working late into the night on a story for the morning edition. I was neither, of course, but it was fun to imagine. Becoming a coffee drinker was natural for me, anyway, as I grew up surrounded by other coffee drinkers.

Tea, on the other hand, had to woo me. It began by turning up in songs – Joan Baez’s Suzanne, for example, with the line about tea and oranges from China – and stories – who could resist Alice’s reaction to the Mad Hatter and March Hare, after all?

But the thing that really made me fall in love with tea was a trip to Carmel when I was a teenager. I don’t remember spending the night, only that I had some pocket money, and it was a very walking-friendly town, and as my parents poked around at the Dansk outlet, I went in and out of cute shops, finally turning down a courtyard and finding myself surrounded by three very cute houses that now held shops, one of which was a Tea Emporium (I know this, because there was a sign).

Memory has become murky, and in my mind’s eye the outside of the tea shop has become muddled with the a-frame home owned by the librarian in some small town where we once lived, and that of my pre-school teacher Ray’s cottage in Golden. But inside…inside I remember with reverence.

Once inside the door of the Tea Emporium (it had a name, but I don’t remember what it was, and the store no longer exists, I’m afraid), I felt that I had entered a different world. Outside the sun was shining, but inside it was dark, and sort of smoky, though there was no actual smoke, not because this was California, but because it might affect the tea. I remember the dark wooden floorboards, the dark shelves with jars full of brown and green leaves, each labeled in perfect calligraphy, the black letters stark against the creamy white paper. I remember the wooden counter, higher than most retail establishments have, and the crusty old man in the green cardigan standing behind it.

“I don’t like children,” he told me gruffly. “Especially boys,” he added.

“I don’t either,” I said, meaning it. “Anyway, I’m a girl.”

“Noticed that,” he told me. “You’re a slip of a thing to be in here alone.”

I goggled at that, I remember. His language was like something out of a book, and it was bright and sunny and perfectly safe outside. But I think all I said was, “I’d like a quarter-pound of English Breakfast and a quarter pound of Earl Grey, please.” Or something equally lame.

I remember that he grunted, but moved around the dimly lit store, sniffing jars, and pouring leaves into opaque paper bags, just like the ones used for coffee. He warned me not to let things steep too long, and to put milk in the tea. He suggested I try a cup of Lady Grey, and I loved the hint of lavender, so he gave me some to take home. He also gave me a black tea laced with orange, that was labeled “orange mélange”. This is not a sweet cinnamon and orange tea, but a dark brew with the essence of citrus, and it was delicious. Lisa’s Tea Treasures makes something similar, I think, but theirs is too sweet, too light, too….wholesome. The orange tea I bought in Carmel had a mysterious air, as if by drinking it one would be transported to the Orient Express, to help Hercule Poirot solve a murder. Or something.

I left the store after about an hour. Or maybe it was forever. Or five minutes. I’ve never been sure. But ever since then I’ve loved tea as much as I ever loved coffee, and the store has had a special place in my heart and mind.

I went back two years later, and there was a tea shop in the same location, just as there is today, but neither shop is the same. No shop has ever been the same. And sometimes I almost wonder if my memory is real, or if it was an ordinary tea shop from the beginning, and my brain created the mysterious ambience, and the crusty clerk. Almost.

In his book On Writing, Stephen King suggests that reading is a form of mind reading married to time travel – that we are reading words offered from the past, and getting a mental image of a place or people we’ve never seen.

I agree with this idea, but I have to add that music often powers a trip through time, as well. Today, for example, I re-visited 1976.

Imagine a school cafeteria in Golden, Colorado. It is autumn, and it is the 70’s so the children are wearing a lot of earth tones – orange, green, red, gold. My six-year-old self is there, in the scene, between the Chinese girl with the fluffy pigtails (Her name is Yvonne, and she has those rubber bands with the beads on the ends that loop around each other – rubber bands for the rubber band impaired), and the boy wearing a Superman t-shirt (His name is Ben, and his mother lives with our pre-school teacher, and once, when we were having a sleepover, he showed his penis to Heather and me. We thought it was funny looking.)

Anyway, I’m between Yvonne (We called her Ping-Ping, because her middle name was Ping) and Ben (Ray, our pre-school teacher, his mother’s lover, an all-around groovous guy, called him Jamin, and I vowed that if I ever had a son, I would name him either Benjamin or Christopher but call him Jamin or Topher – all these years later, I’m married to a Christopher, but I call him Fuzzy. He isn’t the Topher type.) I’m wearing a gold turtleneck and denim overalls with five pockets and lots of metal rivets and my favorite red ked sneakers, and my hair is in braids, and the teacher, who is not my teacher, but is Ben’s (we’re in different first grades)is playing a guitar, and teaching us this song:

Happiness runs in a circular motion
Thought is like a little boat upon the sea.
Everybody is a part of everything anyway,
You can have everything if you let yourself be.

It’s 1976 and we’re learning Donovan songs in school, and next we’ll either sing something by John Denver or Cat Stevens, probably “Morning Has Broken,” because what could be more adorable than a room full of six-year-olds singing about Eden? The teacher, whose name I don’t remember, but might be Mr. Williams, or not, has curly blonde hair, and later that year he’ll come to school dressed as a scarecrow (for Halloween), and for some reason the tufts of straw poking out at wrists and ankles will FREAK ME OUT, because even at six – especially at six – I have an overactive imagination.

That was the year that my friend Terry Bailey, who had a really small gold bike to match her golden hair, and I decided that we were telepathic because we always came to school with our hair the same way. If I had braids, she had braids. If she had a single high ponytail, like Pebbles or Jeannie, I had a single high ponytail. It couldn’t possibly be that our mothers were busy working women and had a limited amount of time to DO little girls’ hair, and so rotated between ponytails (in pairs), braids (in pairs) and high ponytails (or single braids). Clearly, we were sending each other messages. This power was enhanced by the ingestion of liverwurst, which everyone else thought was gross, but we both liked, though we liked Ben’s mother’s peanut-butter-and-honey-in-a-pita better.

I spent about twenty minutes in 1976 today, because that old Donovan song was used in a commercial. Then I returned to the here-and-now of 2005 and wondered if we had any clue that we were singing Donovan songs when we were six, or if any of us even knew who Donovan was.

The problem with this sort of time travel, is that it’s not like flying the Enterprise around the sun, or turning a magical hourglass. It’s uncontrollable travel in short bursts, when you least expect it. Music takes you back randomly, to your own memories, your own experiences, but on the fringes you can hear the whispers of other people, as they share the journey with you, but end in a different place. With reading, the trip is more stable. The destination is fixed.

Either way, these internal explorations are food for thought, sources of smiles, causes of wistful tears, and conversation starters, and after visiting 1976 today, I’m left wondering, when will I travel again, and what will my destination be?