Places Where I've ...

...

On a garage roof
In an unfinished attic
In the “V” between a house roof and a chimney
Twenty-plus feet up in a tree
In a parked car
On a parked car at a race track
In a row boat
On an airplane over the continental USA
On an airplane over the Caribbean Sea
Underneath the dining room table
Underneath the kitchen table
In the bath tub
In the basement by the light of the washing machine
On a school bus
In a library
In a library’s attic
Out in the fields
In a screened-in porch
By a secluded brook
On the beach at the Jersey shore
Against a clothes rack in Nordstrom’s


What do all these locations have in common in my life?

Okay, I know exactly what you’re thinking. Mind out of the gutter, now!

These are not all places where I have, uh, hm, uhhh, you know, done that. No. Though I am a connoisseur of women (well, three actually, and over a twenty-four year span), I have not, uh, actually, well, you know. *

No. These are all places where I have cheerfully, joyfully, and yes, even lovingly, read a book. Each has fond memories in my mind of the worlds I have journeyed to, the lifetimes I have lived. Indeed, my vision of Heaven has the perfected, Platonic ideal of each of these places and an infinituum of awesome novels to read.

Heck, The Lord of the Rings easily takes the prize; most of the unusual reading spots originated with that masterpiece. I vividly remember being at Bilbo’s 111th birthday party, while up in a tree as my father walked by below, oblivious. Saruman got his just comeuppance at the stock car races. Frodo battled Shelob beneath my dining room table as the Battle for Minas Tirith raged by the light of my grandma’s washing machine.

Lately I’ve been doing my reading on the comfy, mushroom-colored couch in my living room. It’s peaceful, cozy, and quiet, and by the light of a shaded 60 watt bulb I’m slipping into rooms of World War I-era Cambridge, the colorful and fragrant dirt-poor by life-rich villages of India, the world of the early 21st century as envisioned by an SF writer in the early 70s, and the humorous and far-out wonders of Known Space.

But my girls get a little older, and I’m gonna have to start reading in the crawlspace under my backyard deck.


* To quote the eminently quotable Steve Martin: “Some people have a way with words. Other people …... oh …… not have way, I guess.”