···Mama Scribble···: Judy Blume & how stories saved me

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The first books I remember reading as a child were Corduroy and Harold and the Purple Crayon.
Still two of my favorites today. These two (and some others) were some books that my mother ordered for me from Scholastic (I recall the packaging.) I remember this because they were the 'free' ones with the purchase of at least one (I believe it worked that way back then). The books stopped arriving quickly because my mother never paid for them in the first place. I remember asking her for more books but she'd say something like, 'I can't buy them for you.' So I read and re-read the few unpaid books that we kept. I've since invested in many books from Scholastic for my own daughters, you know, to re-pay them for the books I kept in 1983.

Reading those little stories always gave me the hope that there was something bigger out there in the world if you really wished and tried hard for it. I knew this in my heart starting at age six. I believed this. I still do. Harold's adventure with his purple crayon and how he drew and decided what came next allowed me to hone in on the idea that we ultimately 'create' what we want in our lives. Harold taught me that no matter how scary or dark things may get, you still have the power to 'draw' a different picture. On the other hand, Corduroy's story gave me the hope that even when you feel lonely in this great big world, there is always someone out there that will show you a different path and perhaps some love even if you are from different worlds. In spite of the little bear's sadness he never stopped believing in love. Perhaps these stories didn't speak much to some people but they were surely seared in my emotional psyche at age six.

Then in 1988, it was yet another book that pulled me away from a rather unsavory reality and allowed me to hover over a world of silliness, humor, grade school drama and the simple act of just being a kid. You see, during this time I was a fourth grade kid myself with a four year old sibling. I empathized with the main character's frustrations and feelings of just how incredibly annoying a younger sibling can be. The humor of it all saved me from my then troubling situation.

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It was Mrs. Grivjack and my fourth class at Coral Park Elementary that allowed me to hide the darkness in my life because it was all I had. Close to the end of that school year Mrs. Grivjack read to the entire class every afternoon as we sat encircled around her on the cold mint and cream checkered linoleum tiled floor. She'd always sit in a large squeaky wooden chair. She read Judy Blume's 'Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing', hard cover edition, retrieved from our school library and it saved me. It saved me from drowning in the issues of my sexual abuse. It saved from knowing that I lived under the same roof of a cocaine dealer. It saved me from still not knowing who my real father was. It saved me from my mother's proximal abandonment toward me. It saved me from my mother's incarceration months later. It saved me from feeling like an orphan. It ultimately saved me from losing hope that one day, my life WOULD undoubtedly be far better than what it looked like to me right then and there.

Judy Blume's humor and love and words and story entranced me into her world of Peter and Fudge and all the other silly, happy and frustrating things that happened to them. Mrs. Grivjack's voice was my escape. The way her large framed bifocal glasses rested atop her ski sloped and heavily powdered nose, an image I got to view from way down below on the linoleum floor every day for months, was the one constant that I turned to for solace in my own silence and embarrassment of having a mother that was behind bars because she had been present during a drug bust. It fucking sucked and there was no way in hell that I was going to tell a living soul, not even my delusional idea of contacting Judy Blume myself.

No matter how dreadful my situation was at the time, I had Judy Blume's story to look forward to. I had the next chapter of Peter and Fudge and Mrs. Grivjack's sweet and enthusiastic cadence of a voice to carry on a story and keep her students, her children, her one tormented and introverted pupil completely enthralled and grateful for the gift of being read to. I was grateful for the momentary escape and for what the story granted me. Laughter, smiles, empathy, the feeling of not feeling alone and also not feeling guilty about wanting to spit a thick ass hawker in my little sisters hair. I was just happy to laugh and shut off the 'rated R' reel that was replaying over and over in my head like an annoying click of a roller ball pen because escaping for that one hour of story time meant that I was relieved from one really fucking bad dream. Like Peter, I was ten and tormented except that his torment was way better than mine. Hands down!

Nothing mattered so much as the next great story that would forever embed itself in my own creativity.

THAT is how stories saved me.

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I read to my girls.

They read to me.

Books are all around us. They don't tire us.

They bring us together.

At the end of each day we get to step into any world we choose to free from it's shelf.

We are lovers of stories and I am a lover of telling them.