Dear Reader:

A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies. The man who never reads lives only one.” ~ Jojen, fictional character, A Dance with Dragons by George R. R. Martin

Reading has been a lifetime joy for me! It has also saved me along my life journey. As a child I would have been lost without Trixie Belden, Nancy Drew, and my other fictional story friends.

After daddy died…I remember I was so lonely. The following year I started first grade and I discovered I was starving to make sense of letters forming words; words forming sentences, and sentences forming stories.

I received more gold stars in the first grade than  other subsequent year. I read more books than anyone else because our family was split between NC and SC and I missed my siblings and my life as part of a whole family. I wanted it back again…but soon realized I could only find it in stories.

Reading made my family whole again…at least in my imagination. I could pretend to solve mysteries with Trixie and Nancy and come home to their wise fathers. I wanted a father again badly. I wanted to be the princess again in my family….not the lost little girl that I became.

According to the introductory quote: I have lived thousands of lives because it is rare to find me without a book for any length of time. Something is missing in my life if I am  not involved in another character’s existence.

When I took on the challenge of writing and telling 1002 blog stories…one more than Scheherazade did in 1001 Arabian Nights I knew I could tell 1002 stories if my health didn’t fail me before my goal was reached….it didn’t. Because of all the stories I had read I had more than enough “material” to over-take 1001.

I now know that whenever my time is up….I will have completed my earthly stories and start a new book of never-ending tales….stories that will be with me forever.

Honey forwarded me an email she had received last week and she knew I would relate to it well….it was about remembering items from the baby boomers’ childhoods of the fifties and sixties.

Most of these items have come and gone….but one made me laugh. It was the library sign-out card and I just filled mine out last week when I checked out two more books at Timrod. Don’t you love using card catalogues again to find a book when you go in there? I sure do!

Go Timrod! It’s like going back in history every time I enter…it even smells like the past….the way a library should smell….that wonderful scent of possibilities that bring me such joy!

I realize now that when I got my first library card…my life began.

So until tomorrow…In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God (John 1:1)

*Without libraries what have we? We have no past and no future.

–Ray Bradbury

“Today is my favorite day”  Winnie the Pooh