The Whole Universe, Ours to Enjoy

I love to read. Always have, since I could read. God bless my mother. She is 80 years young, turns 81 in July. She was born in a then remote area of Rabun County in 1928, to a mostly uneducated sharecropper father and a mother so busy with, at that time 7 other children. Three more followed my mother into this world, giving her 10 siblings, 8 girls and 2 boys. Hermother died of cancer when she was 13, in 1941, and the task of raising the three youngest fell on her, as her older siblings were leaving home, the boys to war in Europe for one, the Pacific theater for the other, and the girls on to boarding school or marriage. Life for them was mostly work, taking care of the house and helping in the fields, growing corn for sale and livestock, and a kitchen garden to survive on. This left my mother very little time for education or recreational reading, but when she married and had children of her own ( 2, my older brother and myself) she recognised the need for books and education, to help her children break the cycle of poverty that she had grown up in, and to expose us to a great big, remarkable world that she knew precious little about. My father cared little for education or family life, and was gone by the time I was 2 years old, again leaving my mother to provide for small children, and new her aging father as well, all on the income of a low skill job in a textile plant. But through all the hardship and sacrifice, she still found a way to make sure we had a houseful of books, and encouraged, no, made us study and keep up our homework. As a result of her foresight my brother and I both are avid readers. I'll always be grateful to Mother for this. Through books the world has indeed been opened up to me. I've had high adventure on the high seas, fought battles on the steppes of nepal, flown missions to far away planets, and multitudes of other experiences attainable to most of us only in the pages of books. As I've grown older my interest have evolved from fiction to history, biography, and the study of life on earth, but my passion for reading itself has not waned. Even though the subject matter I follow is historical in nature, it is no less fascinating, and the adventures no less exhilirating. If anything the events I now read of are even more fantastic than the fictional stories of my youth, for they were actually lived, people really experienced them. Imagine the wide-eyed wonder of Marco polo as he travelled through the East, the thrill that Lewis and Clark must have felt as they pushed across the western frontiers of this great continent, seeing places and wonders and peoples totally unseen before by European eyes. We are all able to relive these wonders and events through the historical record, in books, journals, and diaries of those who were there. Thanks, my dear Mother, for giving me all this wonder!