For Betty on her Birthday

This is a day when I think of my grandmother.  It would have been her birthday.  In the ten or so years before she passed away, she would always come to visit from Pennsylvania at this time of year.  I would walk in from high school to see her seated at my parents’ kitchen table with a mug of coffee that had long since gone cold, and a book.  She always had a book and a card from my mother for a bookmark; After a hug and a kiss on her paper thin cheek, I would sit down with her and ask her what she was reading.  She introduced me to Elizabeth George and P.D. James, whom I read to this day.  But what I most loved was simply sitting in the living room with her.  She would sit in the arm chair by the window and I would lie on the couch and we would immerse ourselves in whatever we were reading at the time.  It was enough just to share the room.

My students are writing college essays this coming week, and one of the questions revolves around the idea of a safe space.  Where are you comfortable?  Where are you content?  Where do you return again and again to feel that sense of calm?  For me, it is to my parents’ living room.  It has changed over the years, but in my memory and thoughts, it is the furniture I grew up with to which I return.  Peach colored sofa and arm chairs.  Tons of light from the windows on all sides.  A hutch filled with beautiful knick knacks (a colorful rooster, antique pen and ink set…). It is early summer, so everything is bright with the sunlight.  Dust motes dance in the air.  A pensive rabbi studies Torah in the painting closest to my grandmother, and a young Asian girl smiles a mysterious smile from the painting above my couch. Everything is light and airy, and we read and share the space. 

I have always found comfort and safety in books.  I am an insomniac by nature, so books have provided me with a way through the night many a time.  When I cannot stop my brain from circling around what during the day seemed innocuous and non-stressworthy, I turn to a book.  I take shelter in someone else’s words and wrap myself in a blanket of characters and dialogue and preferably a completely different setting from my own.  I want someone else’s problems, someone else’s family, someone else’s dysfunction to distract me and to lull me into sleep. 

So perhaps, if I were to respond to this college essay prompt, I would say, my safe spot is on a peach colored couch, with a book in my hand and my grandmother in the corner of the room.  But lacking these things, as I must, I will settle for a book in my hand.