Small Town Dreams

Most memories I have of the small town I grew up in are drenched in melancholy.  I don't know how else to describe it.  From a relatively young age I had full run of it with the help of my bicycle and the desire to experience something new or different.  To my small brain it was like a huge and elaborate labyrinth in Dungeons & Dragons, a role playing game I shared with friends in my Middle and early High School years.  I explored the main roads, side streets, and alley ways imagining any number of scenarios, embodying a variety of characters.  I was a little Walter Mitty before I'd ever read the short story.  But it shrunk year by year.

And speaking of short stories,  reading was the other avenue of escape from a mundane small town existence that was available to me.  Reading books in secret places opened internal doors.  They were portals to other worlds and my first forays were with library books that transitioned to starting my own collection of science fiction and fantasy books when I had the money to do so.  There were the Scholastic Book Club flyers in Elementary School, of course, but things really opened up in Middle School when I discovered an advertisement for the Science Fiction & Fantasy Book Club in a comic book.

Here's how it worked...  I would buy a book for about ten to fifteen dollars (not including shipping & handling) and get four free ones mailed to me as a joining bonus (inexpressible joy!).  I was then obligated to buy a few more before I could end my membership which I did at the first opportunity.  I would then promptly rejoin to get the same deal, and repeat.  In this way I built up a sizable collection of hardback books which were my prized possessions.  I still have some of those early titles buried in boxes in the crawl space under my living room: The Dragon Riders of Pern, Isaac Asimov's Foundation series, The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, etc.  I loved their uniformity on the shelf and colorful spines.  They had such heft in the hand and a peculiar smell I loved.

So, these were ways for my mind to escape the boundaries of our small town, an engine powered by imagination and dreams of the future.  In retrospect, the journey from then until now does seem rather epic (full of unexpected plot twists and cliff hangers), but never moreso than when I look into the faces of my children.


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