No Cost Travel Anywhere
- Deborah Llewellyn
- Aug 11
- 11 min read
Earlier this summer, I sat on my porch swing in mid-day and read for two hours because I couldn’t wait to find out how a story ended. I felt guilty, thinking that I should be weeding the garden, doing some housework, or working on my creative pursuits with the vigor I once put into a full-time career. I check out books from two libraries and often have a stack of five or six that I’m keen to read, having selected them from suggestions made by New York Times, NPR, Oprah, The Guardian, Reese, Goodreads, and my friends. Typically, I succumb to their lure for a half hour in late afternoon before I cook dinner and again for 1.5 hours in bed at night.
That summer day, closing a book that swept me along its currents like a tubing adventure, I made an announcement (to myself): Hey, it’s summer time. A time to relax, take a vacation, break out of routine and read for hours smack in the middle of the day. Or start your day in the garden with a book and cup of coffee. Give in to the urge. After all, books are your happy place.
Now I’m diving into reading with wantonness I haven’t known since childhood. I realized that while my friends are traveling abroad and I’m at home on my front porch, I can cover more territory and at no cost. It was brought home to me when I returned Wally Lamb’s latest book, The River is Waiting, to the Morehead Library. and read this week’s posting on the sandwich board outside the door. “Reading is a discount ticket to anywhere.” I thought of where I had just traveled – inside a prison – and witnessed the horrors and acts of kindness found behind bars by a father who caused the death of his toddler. Not a place you’d want to travel but an opportunity to see something beyond my everyday experience and leave, changed.
As I left the library and glanced at the signboard, again, I thought back to my childhood summers. In my neighborhood, kids played barefoot in the yard, searched for 4-leaf clovers, built forts, and waited on the steps for something to happen while a popsicle dripped down their arms. My family had no extra money beyond essentials and entertainment had to be free. My mother sometimes broke the routine by taking us fishing along with her sister and my cousins, or we picked blackberries and helped her make preserves. We ran though the sprinkler, drew pictures in the dirt, caught fireflies, and sometimes went to the river to swim.
There was one way that my summer was different from other kids in the neighborhood. My mom took me to the library. This, she could afford and she recognized the joy of fiction for an imaginative child. From fiction, I learned about children with different experiences from my own. These children went to summer camp and learned archery and how to canoe. They kept spy journals on all the neighbors, solved mysteries, and discovered a secret garden. Like the Boxcar Children or Pippi Longstocking, some lived completely free from adults, which I thought would be fabulous, especially with a monkey and a horse as room-mates.
As a child, I traveled out west on a covered wagon, to the Swiss Alps with Heidi, learned to be a people watcher like Eloise in the Plaza Hotel, stopped killing spiders after meeting Charlotte, and helped to solve a stork mystery at a schoolhouse in Holland. I entered fantasy land in Oz and through the door of a wardrobe. I started to believe in the possibility of magic, secret rooms, and tiny people called the Borrowers who likely took my hair barrette. I set traps. Fiction flowed into life.
I don’t recall going to the public library in the winter. These excursions were saved for summer. When I was in upper elementary, the summers of fourth through sixth grades, my mother helped me acquire my own library card. She allowed me to walk to a branch library, about two miles from our house, since she was working and could not take me. I loved being in the quiet space with shelves lined with treasures. I chose carefully because I had to carry them home. As I chose each book I stacked and weighed them in my arms to know when I had reached my limit. I can imagine the amused librarian’s expression.
Back home, I plopped on my bed, surrounded by a pile of possibility, and dived into the latest version of me. You see, I didn’t just read the book, I became the character in the book. I did this so many times that I soon realized that I could simply sit down, especially in boring places like church, and imagine an entire story in my head. I discovered how to travel with my mind. That’s how I became a writer.
In novels, I discovered that girls could do anything that boys did, and more. In life, boys got all the attention and girls sat like a lady and watched. In books, however, girls raised baby elephants, built treehouses, solved mysteries, saved people, and tamed wild ponies. Novels put ideas in my head. I started begging for a pony. I told my dad they were free on Chincoteague Island but he reminded me we lived in the city. Swayed by my begging, we took Sunday afternoon drives in the country and he stopped at farms with ponies for sale, as if we were interested clients, just so I could get close and stroke a pony’s mane. Dad was just working through the motions of my fantasy at a safe level. Good dad; he played along.
One day an administrator from the city recreation department came to our school a few days before the end of term. She told us about a summer day camp that cost $10. We would spend the week on imaginary Hawaiian Islands learning crafts, folk stories, dances and songs. There would be a sleepover on the last night. The transportation from our neighborhood to day-camp at a park across town would be provided by the city. I begged and begged. Finally, after deliberation with my mom behind closed doors, he handed me $10 and the next day I took it to school with the signed permission slip and registered. It wasn’t sleep-away camp like in my novels but I could pretend.
In high school I signed up for typing, a useful skill for a budding novelist. But then I heard that some of my friends had signed up as a library assistant for their elective class.They reported that their job was to shelf returned books, which only took a few minutes. After that, they could stand in the stacks and read, read, read. I was torn with envy.
Shortly after, having accomplished a typing speed of 55 words per minute, I marched into the school office and announced that I wanted to drop typing since I had learned as much as I needed and that I would like to become a library assistant, since either way I did not need the course credit to graduate.
The typing teacher was furious when she was told I asked to drop out of class. In a threatening voice, in front of the entire class, she told me I could not drop out. Her justification was that when I was able to work as a typist to help put my husband through medical school, I would thank her. Still determined, I returned to the school office and was finally given permission to switch from typing to library without returning to class. The next day I shelved some novels on the “B” shelf and pulled out a copy of The Good Earth. That book drew me into a multi-year fascination with the history of China.
Later during college years, I used my typing skills to get a part-time job typing environmental research papers for scientific journals. I liked the subject matter and the head typist/secretary who hired me. At the end of the semester her husband graduated from law school and told her he had fallen in love with a classmate and wanted a divorce. So much for typing for a husband’s education rather than funding your own.
I never go anyplace without a book. Wait time is reading time. I once saw a woman with a book clipped to her steering wheel so she could read at stoplights. I considered it but decided this was going too far. This was years before the invention of audible.
I traveled overseas for work and was limited in the number of novels I could take with me. I’ll never forget a job with Save the Children in South Sudan. I was contracted to help resettled refugees establish non-formal education activities for their preschool children. The work in this war-torn country was so dangerous that we could not travel far from Save the Children’s tented camp which could have provided lots of reading time in off-hours.
I was particularly urged to keep a low profile since I entered Sudan from Ethiopia and my passport with a visa stamp for South Sudan was held up in Uganda. Entering the country without a passport or visa stamp put me at risk of imprisonment in a stick-hut by a7-feet tall “army-ish” warlord. After an early supper and staff meeting in late afternoon, the generator was turned off and we went to our tents. I had a flashlight and two novels to last ten days. I remember counting the pages to determine how much I could allow myself to read each night. The paucity of reading material scared me more than the rabid bat we chased from my tent.
Soon came the joy of Kindle. I could load it with dozens of books and never run out of reading material. Even without electricity I could read my e-book. Audible put me in ecstasy. I can now listen to books when I take my hour walk each day. I rotate between historical fiction (The Women of Chateau Lafayette or The Briar Club) and non-fiction (An Unfinished Love Story with fascinating details about politics of the sixties, and Revenge of the Tipping Point, which looks at the spread of new behaviors, such as Medicaid fraud tactics. I can even listen to books in the dentist chair. I admit that I have a book addiction. Thank goodness for free public libraries.
Writing about reading makes me think back to my daughter, Bronwyn, and her childhood passion for reading. She claimed that one of her best gifts ever was a weighted green leather page holder that held open her books while she brushed her teeth or ate her lunch at school. I noticed that she is still using it. I remember her excitement in fifth grade when the library allowed fifth graders to take home five books, up from four in the previous year. My little scientist squealed, “Now I can try fiction.” Prior to that, all the books she checked out were non-fiction on the subject of animals.
Our son, Chas, loved bedtime stories. Throughout childhood my husband and I switched a kid each night and picked back up on what we were reading night before last. Whether it was Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (me) or Jurassic Park (daddy), our son (or daughter) could not wait for bedtime. Assuming the Importance of bedtime reading to Chas, we took a risk.
He had a terrible habit that drove us crazy at mealtimes. He took a bite of food and then walked round and round the table while he chewed. We tried privileges (dessert) and punishments (no dessert) but nothing worked. His behavior was so disruptive during the family dinner that we finally announced that if he did it at any mealtime there would be no bedtime story that night. It was a serious threat and a risk to us who considered bedtime reading a hallmark of good parenting. When we announced the ultimate punishment, he looked at us as if we had dropped a bomb. In a flash, he got back into his seat and never again left the table before being dismissed. We continued this bedtime reading tradition for both children from age one to ten or twelve years. This is how readers make readers.
My sister, Krista, born fourteen years after me, shares my love of reading. She was born the summer that our father became a paraplegic from a surgical accident. I took over much of her care while our mother provided nursing care for our dad. I was trying to remember whether I took her to the library and if I read to her.
We spoke and shared memories as we love to do. She told me that I definitely inspired a love of reading. She remembered the Roald Dhal novel, James and the Giant Peach, that I gave to her as a gift. As an adult she read the book to her three daughters. They have fond memories of cuddling up and listening to their mom read that novel. When Krista’s children grew up, she gave that book to daughter, Leah, who is a literature major and librarian. Leah in turn gave the book to her first born niece, Rae. Missing her copy, Leah Arbella went on-line and bought herself a copy of that novel from the year of publication. For me, like Krista, her children, and my children, books are associated with love.
This year, there were no foreign or domestic trips in my summer plans but I have traveled far. I met an adorable child who said she was from another galaxy (Where the Forest Meets the Stars) and one who actually was (The Bones Beneath My Skin). I time traveled to the 60’s with Doris Kearns and Richard Goodwin. I traveled west with a giraffe and walked over fifty years with an African Elephant (Memories of an Elephant). I dove beneath the seas (Playground) and got lost on the Appalachian trail (Heartwood). I discovered uncanny outcomes from chance encounters (The Wedding People; and Great Big Beautiful Life).
I laughed and laughed at the escapades of a brilliant little girl living in the slums of Soweta, South Africa, who amasses diamonds, unravels nuclear secrets, and saves the King of Sweden. I traveled to outer space (Orbital; and Atmosphere). I met a social justice crusader, Frances Perkins, who is responsible for eradicating child labor, giving us forty-hour work weeks and instituting over-time pay (Becoming Madame Secretary). I traveled to Holland (Safekeep) and to Iran (Lion Women of Tehran) and to Chile during the revolution (My name is Elmilia Del Valle) with women who remind us how childhood experiences dramatically affect one’s adult life. Thankfully, there’s another month of summer left and my list of books to read continues to grow.
I am ever grateful for libraries in my life and the doors they have opened. No matter what I am going through in my life, I can find a book that helps me process my thoughts. When I need excitement or a twist of fate, there is fiction galore. When I want to know a friend better, we discuss a shared book. When I want to learn about history that was so poorly taught in public school, I turn to biographies. When I need a special gift, there is nothing better than a book.
I am not so naïve to believe that traveling through books is equal to first-hand experience. That came home to me as returning friends described the astonishment of turning a corner in old Krakow, Poland, and coming across two musicians playing Bach on accordions. On the other hand, thanks to books, I am having a wonderful summer and traveling the world for free.
Join me!
Written by Deborah Llewellyn, Beaufort, North Carolina
Deborah you reminded me how much I enjoyed devouring Nancy Drew mysteries when I was growing up. Thanks for the memories.
Our book group is my most cherished group of women of which to be a part.