A Family of Book Lovers

Christmas cards started coming yesterday, and one of them was from my cousin Sue who has taken on the yearly job of creating a Keenan calendar -- birthdays and anniversaries and other dates important to the Keenan clan. She organizes pictures for each month and often chooses a theme. This year it revolves around favorite books and reading, an apt choice for a family where the schoolteachers are thick on the ground. Most of the women have an education degree of one kind or another and are guilty of an awful lot of literacy.

I was excited because I can't remember a time when I haven't been starting, in the middle or finishing a book. Even before I could read, Mom would pile us all in the big gray rocking chair and read to us -- the Churchmouse Stories and Danny and the Dinosaur.

I used to tote around a pile of those little square books every time we traveled in the car. Then I graduated to Trixie Belden mysteries with which I humiliated my sisters by reading at ballgames and church.

When my nieces were little, I loved finding them books -- Professor Wormbog and the Search for the Zipperumpazoo and Shel Silverstein's Where the Sidewalk Ends. A couple of Christmases ago, I was delighted beyond words when Meredith climbed on my lap for a reading of The Adventures of Walter Kitty, the way we did when she was little.

I still like to find books for them, but now it's Water for Elephants and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. But better than that, they're now finding books for me. Samantha just handed me a copy of Going Bovine and said she couldn't wait to talk to me about it.

Keenan literacy lives on!