I can’t remember a time when I didn’t have a book (or two or twenty) at hand. I am a bibliophile, and it’s all my mother’s fault.

Every time we went to the grocery store, our first stop was a rack of Little Golden Books. Mom would select one for me to look at as I sat in the basket of our cart, and I’d flip through the pages over and over again until we were home and she could sit down and read it to me. One day, I started reading aloud in the grocery aisle. Mom thought I’d memorized the text until she realized that she’d just given me this book a few aisles over.

Although I developed a lot of impolite habits, like reading at the table during restaurant meals, finding a hiding place to read so I wouldn’t be sent outside to play with the other kids, and staying up past my bedtime to read a few more pages, Mom never refused my requests for books. Sometimes she limited my selections to one, though. As I grew older, one of my holiday gifts was a trip to the bookstore to select books that would be wrapped and put away until the particular day of gift giving. Mom pretended that she didn’t know I unwrapped them, read them, and then rewrapped them.

I’ve shared my obsession with my own kids, reading to them long after they could read for themselves. I’ll never forget, and I hope they won’t either, reading the Harry Potter series together and making up voices for the different characters. My Dobby is vastly superior to the movie version.

So why a “Thanks Mom” as my first blog post? Mom encouraged my love affair with books, and that’s led me to a career that I enjoy. How much of a “job” can it be if I get to read every day?

P.S.

Tragically, my Little Golden Books were destroyed when our basement flooded. Mom did give me a new Kindle recently, though. More on the latter in the future.