Dear Reading....

I wrote this for another class, but I wanted to share it here.  If you read it, please leave a comment or two!

In a world that was about to undergo a trial that had not been experienced by human beings in living memory, the death of Kobe Bryant at the end of January was a harbinger of all that has come in the early days of the decade. His death showed the delicacy that surrounds life; everything is brief. Freedom is fleeting. Love is fleeting. Life, itself, is fleeting.  

His death put his extraordinary achievements in life into sharp focus. One of those, his Oscar-Winning Short animation, Dear Basketball, details his love affair with basketball using personification, and Kobe thanks to the sport for all it has done for him, before revealing his reasons for letting the game go at this stage in his life. So, I began to think, what entity in my life would be my Dear Basketball? What in this world has shaped who I am and who I would become as I journeyed through its ups and downs? Why am I, me? What has pushed me to be the woman I am?

Ask anyone that knows me, and they would say history; I have lived and breathed for the subject ever since my mother, who was a history teacher at Everett High School in Lansing, Michigan, had me grade papers once I learned my alphabet. Initially, I would match the letters on the key to the right or wrong answers on the students’ papers. When I learned how to read the questions, I would ask her, “Who is Columbus?” or “What is slavery?” and thus, I became the lover of history that I am today. But notice what I said. I said, “When I learned to read.” For, I would not be the history aficionado that I am if I was not the reader that I am. Eureka! This is my Dear Basketball subject: my love affair with reading. Reading is the one thing that sustains me above all else. I can sit in silence, no television, phone, or music – as long as I have a book in my hand. It doesn’t matter what it is; I will read it. I just have to be digesting information. Reading is the essence of what makes me. I would not be Shanna Hightower Robinson if I were not a reader. But because I am Shanna Hightower Robinson, I read.

Dear Reading,

Since I was a young girl that listened to Disneyland Books on Record, you have been my saving grace, the thing to make me sane, the thing that made me whole. 

I am everything because of you. When I doubted myself, I found solace in the sun-kissed beaches of Sweet Valley High, inspired first by Jessica Wakefield and then by Elizabeth Wakefield when I realized that brains trump beauty every time.  When my father was diagnosed with cancer, I turned to you to make sense of the tragedy. When I wanted to go to graduate school, I knew that my close friendship with you would make my journey so much easier, and it did.  When I tried to kill myself, it was my devotion to you and the secrets you still held dear, especially about Harry Potter and his final battle with Voldemort that kept me alive.  Like Shel Silverstein’s Tree, you give and give and give, and I take and take, until one day when I am old and can no longer continue in the world, you will still provide me with shelter and comfort.  There have been days when you and your circle of friends have been my only support system.  There is no day that we are not together, nor does a day pass in which I do not feel all of the love you have given me over the years.  

Our bond is unbreakable, and we are inseparable.  I can do anything with you beside me, and more so than Jesus, you are my rock, my shield, my protector.  I couldn’t imagine my life without the role that you play in it, daily, hourly, by the minute, second, nanosecond.  There are times when I neglect you, relegate you to the back burner, take you for granted, besmirch our relationship.  I feel like I cheat on you with screens and Audibles and radio rebranded and manufactured dreck, with applications that take what you are capable of and reduce it to something consumed as quickly as tapas.  Two hundred forty tiny tidbits that only hint at what you and I genuinely have with one another; what we mean to one another.  But this is because you have also changed.  Once a bringer of truth, you have become a slave to it, subjected and degraded to something no longer recognizable; manipulated and used by men who abuse you for their own ends – and make it difficult to trust what you tell us.  

I know that you have morphed and changed, as I have morphed and changed – you are now adaptable to screens, and Audibles and podcasts – but I want you to stay pure.  As pure as you were when you were available to a select few and then as pure as you were when Johannes Gutenberg allowed you access to the masses. Why is it so difficult to accept that as the world changes, so do you and you make your self more open and not less, like when siblings find out that parental love isn’t divided, it’s multiplied? It’s difficult to internalize because it changes our shared experience, but I must accept this change with clarity of purpose and grace if I am to adapt and move along with the times as well.      

When I am with you, you keep me grounded, force me to be in the moment, force me to reckon with myself even when you whisk me to and fro in time and space and place.  When you and I are serious, you force me to come to terms with who I am and what I want; you force me to look at myself squarely in the mirror at who I am.  Every time we meet, I am becoming, and I am continually changing– even in our most frivolous of interactions.  

Although I try to spread the love you have given me, I am not worthy of being your messenger.  I cannot get people to love you as much as I do, and it makes me sad that I cannot share your specialness as quickly as I want to with my students.  But, like clockwork, in the time it takes me to restart our love affair with some slim tome that draws me in, you fold me into your bosom and give me the strength and the knowledge to try again and like a missionary with the faith of a mustard seed, I move forward blessed by your grace. I have to complete this, the most important mission of my life, to spread your light to the world.    I try, even though I fail.  

And although I am no longer the little girl, alone, in the basement, I am still the girl that turns the page when she hears the chime; I am always reading along.  I am constantly learning and doing and being, because of you. You took a broken, lonely person whose mother worked too long and taught her how to be self-sufficient.  And the only way I can pay you back is to share your gift with the world. But with your guidance and support, I can do it.  I will teach my students that it is about attitude and perseverance, and the joys are worth it in the end.  

  

Let’s Begin Now.

All my love, forever and ever,

Shanna