Okay, I’m back. I wanted to voicenote - I recorded a voicenote for you, but the results were unsatisfactory. I wasn’t making my point as clearly as I wanted, so the following will be a ramble you can read.
This morning, I took a walk, which should be a non-negotiable - the day is always brighter for this early decision. Nature sings loudly and in context. The world takes shape. The sun hit the palm trees that flank my road, rendering them in soft orange light. I passed dog walkers on the street now and then. No one I knew, thank God, since I was wearing a baggy grey sweatshirt slung hurriedly over the thing I slept in. It was 6.40. I looked pretty unkempt. Annoyingly, I then turned the corner and ran right into the coffee shop man, who was waving cheerily. This only ever happens when you take a walk straight out of bed. I shouldn’t care. I shouldn’t care. Everyone knows that the only way you can circumvent people catching you out when you’re looking one flew over the cuckoo’s nest-ey is by never looking one flew over the cuckoo’s nest-ey; by always looking ‘good.’ Since I’m not prepared to do all that, this is what we get.
Still. All that’s beside the point. I was thinking about the first time I read something that moved me. It probably wasn’t the very first - I was a book addict long before I remember - but this is the oldest, most poignant thing I recall: how someone else’s art saved me during a troubling time.
picture of my exact edition
JAMES & THE GIANT PEACH
by Roald Dahl
I was six, and this is what I read.
James had two aunts - Aunt Sponge and Aunt Spiker- who took him in after his parents died and were vile and vain! The first thing I noticed about this story was that there was no mother or father. I could relate. His caregivers appeared to hate him. Oh, how I could relate. They communicated in poetry and song - this book was for me! At just shy of six years old, my mother delivered me to my tough, religious grandparents in a white, working-class town, believing it would be a safer environment. And it was, and it was not.
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