Stepping In... to Step Deeper into the World

 I have met more than one person who very much likes StoryCorps stories, a brief weekly spot on Public Radio's Friday news programs.  The StoryCorps project traveled around the U.S. for years, recording ordinary Americans as they told about pivotal events in their life journeys. Many of what is shared is poignant.  When I take pen to paper to write my own thoughts about a wider world and reading, there is one particular StoryCorps spot that comes to mind.  As I imagine the experience in my mind, it also has to do with Nature.

A woman explained to StoryCorps how a bookmobile became a life-changing experience for her.  As a little girl, she lived with her family in Native American migrant-worker camp.  Traveling so frequently, the girl was not allowed to have books, because they would have been too heavy to move.  But then one day, when the girl was 12, a traveling library (a bookmobile) stopped on its periodic rounds where the family was currently living.  And the girl was invited to step in.

As the now grown woman explained her childhood experience, when first told she could take home a book from the mobile, she wondered what was the catch.  Being told there was none other than returning the book in two weeks, she began to devour books.  And her having stepped (at first hesitantly) into the bookmobile made it possible for her to step into a whole new world. Or perhaps I should say "worlds," because the girl's selections ranged from volcanoes to dinosaurs.

"The Journey" (1903)
by
Elizabeth Shippen Green

The child's stepping into that vehicle filled with books reminded me how each book can become for us a vehicle by which we step into the mind, and maybe the emotions of the author of that book. By so doing, we expand our world, even bringing hope to some corner of our lives where it previously could not be seen.  As the woman explained to StoryCorps, because of those books, "By the time I was 15, I knew there was a world outside of the camps.... I believed I could find a place in it.  And I did."

I am humbled by this story.  Although the family I grew up in was decidedly middle-class, we had a couple of filled bookcases in our house; and my mother periodically purchased an additional book so that our home library might grow as I grew.  I am also humbled because I know that it is upon the often hard lives of migrant workers that I depend for life when I purchase fruits or vegetables at the grocery store.

This woman's story came back to my mind during the COVID pandemic. Many of us had to step back into our homes in order to protect ourselves or others -- even when we would have preferred to go about freely. We turned to electronic means of communication to try to satisfy that human desire to learn and connect with more than our individual lives. Those methods were less satisfying than the "real thing." Nevertheless, the confinement of our circumstances could make us more aware of how much we needed each other, and how much other people depended upon us..

~~~

How have books widened your world?  Has there been a critical experience in your life that has made your life richer than it otherwise would have been?

(The quotation is from "Once Forbidden, Books Become A Lifeline

 For A Young Migrant Worker," by NPR Staff, May 30, 2014, and is used here under Fair Use.)
(The illustration by Green is in the Public 'Domain.)