ANNIVERSARIES

I originally wrote this back in 2005. And if mom had made it to July she probably would have reupped for another year of the Geographic. In the past fifteen years a few things changed. Besides moving. We stopped taking the Portland paper. Thanks to competition from the net, 24/7 news, and the general apparent dumbing down of my neighbors the Portland Oregonian basically quit servicing the rest of the state outside the metro area. 

Yes, you can access the paper online but it's not the same as thumbing through the paper getting ink on your fingers. And the specialty sections are subscription only. 
The Eugene Register Guard is still a family owned paper, but frankly all the extra paper is something I just don't needed. 

The nephews still don't read anything more than they need to. Somehow the reading genes from mom and dad landed on me. I got the double dose and proud of it.

Sometime this year there is a fifty-year anniversary. If I wanted to dig through the stored National Geographics I could find the exact month we started taking them. I think it was July actually. There were two constants when I was growing up. No matter how tight things were the subscriptions to the Geographic and Reader’s digest were renewed. We still take the Geographic; we’ve always taken at least two newspapers. I can’t remember when I was introduced to the local library. It wasn’t half bad for a logging town of about 3500 people.

I used to joke that I was born with a book in my hands and I’d read darn near anything. Books about rivers, mountains, submarines, other countries, dog stories, cat stories, historical novels, science fiction, fantasy, encyclopedias, aspirin labels, the first aid book. If it was that black on that white I answered the siren call. I’m not sure that my folks always knew what to make of me. I went to Ben Hur in the fifth grade and promptly went to the library and checked out the book-the unabridged version. I never much cared for romances though.

You may ask what brought on this little meditation. I’ve got five nephews and I don’t think any of them read just for the fun of it. They all get excellent grades; they pass their tests with flying colors. They play sports: the whole modern child hood bit. Video games all that great expensive stuff but the magic isn’t there. Henry VIII is as real to me as Bill Clinton. Paul Revere’s Boston as familiar as down town Eugene, Anne McCaffrey’s Pern is as real as my back yard. (I’ve always had a thing for dragons.)

And honestly I don't know how I got turned on to science fiction and fantasy. Maybe there was a copy of Amazing Stories or Galaxy when I hit the comics section at the local store. Have to admit that some the authors I loved when I was a kid haven't aged that well. Heinlein for one. And I still have a thing for dragons, hobbits, robots, and sandworms. And Star Trek. Original Trek, and maybe Picard. Not JJ Abrams. Not much anyway.And Khan played by a Brit? At least Montalban "looked" like he could have been a Sikh. 

We were members of the Methodist church in Oakridge and mom was active in Ebbert in Springfield. Anyway. She went with the Springfield UMW group to a yearly meeting in Roseburg, I think. One of the Oakridge delegates was the retired city librarian. We moved in 1968 and this was around 2012. She asked about me. I guess it isn't so strange I was in there about once a week for I don't know how many years.  And given the relative size of Oakridge and Springfield, Oakridge actually had the better library. In my opinion.

Oh, well I keep hoping lightning will strike.