When I was a kid, my grandma's basement housed a lot of things; canned fruits and vegetables, way-too-realistic-looking toy guns from when my uncles were children, a persistent mildew smell. But what I was most interested in, of course, were the books! A shelf in the corner held a relatively small but reliably strange collection of damp books, many of which I read on the long afternoons Alex and I spent there during the summer. I know it's such a cliche to reminisce about the laziness of your youthful summers, but man, it just seemed like we had
endless amounts of time then. I could just pick up a book I'd never heard of and knew nothing about and not think about all the other millions of things I should be doing with my time. Okay, to be honest that
kind of sounds like my life now. But it was just different somehow. When I think of summers spent at my grandparents', I think of Little Alex running around wearing an army helmet, stray cats that we terrorized (
we were just trying to love them!), and rooting through those books in the basement.
Memorable books include a cautionary but still pretty tame story about teen pregnancy that I really wish I could remember the title of; a copy of
1984 that included a picture of George Orwell with a mustache added by one of my aunts or uncles; a young-girl-friendship book called
The Secret Language; and this gem, which I just remembered today for no reason at all:
Tomas and his sister didn't have parents or something, and they were trying to avoid being found out by children's services or the welfare agency. It was all very Boxcar Children, but with a Puerto-Rican twist. That cover's been lodged in my brain ever since I first saw it. I wish book covers still had this delightful hand-drawn look. I would say that I want to save this book for my future children, but honestly, it's probably been overtaken by the mildew at this point.
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