LeVar Burton Would Be Proud

If you had asked me about 5 months ago, “Cristina, read any good books lately?” I would have replied simply with this lame but truthful response, “I don’t read.” It was a sad thing to admit. This truth was especially depressing because in college I was assigned to read books. The only books I read prior to going to Rome were Harry Potter books. To me J.K. Rowling is a god. In the past I had read books for school, but that was rare and I truly had to be interested in the subject matter in order for an attempt to even be made. I liked to believe in my own psychological theories on human behavior rather than listen to Piaget, Kohlberg, or Freud.

My father had gotten me into the habit of occasionally perusing the headline stories in the newspaper. “You are going to be traveling and living in Europe. Europeans know so much more than the average American about even American politics!” It made sense to me that I should know what is going on it the world if I was going to travel around it. So I started to read a few articles here and there, but that was it.

Reading was never something that I did in my spare time. I never waited to get home so I could curl up in a blanket on the couch and read my favorite classic. I even remember in elementary school checking out books from the library and just looking at the pictures. I would turn it to my favorite picture page and take out a blank sheet of paper during SSR (silent sustained reading) and draw. I do not remember actually reading anything. I think my teachers never stopped me from doing this because I was a good student. It was either for that reason or the fact that drawing was also a quiet activity.

I loved stories being read to me and I liked even more to create my own books during writer’s workshop and illustrate them. I would much rather create something than try to understand something that someone else created.

I guess I have always been a bit like that. My mother loves to recount the story of when I was 3 years old and taking ballet. I do not know whether or not these are my own memories or memories that I have formed because of what my mother told me, but I “remember” her teaching me the correct way to do the ballet moves and me completely rejecting her tutelage. “Cristina, Teacher Pam said that it is like this,” she would say. “No it’s not,” I would state matter-of-factly. “It is like this,” I explained as I made up a move that was both dramatic and ridiculous. These moves and poses usually involved my neck to bend to one side almost to the point of breaking, my arms outstretched embracing the sky, and my foot completely turned in as if I had some horrible birth defect that would make old women who saw me stop and say, "Poor little thing." My mother just shook her head and breathed a sigh of hopelessness as she suffered through my "lessons."


(This is a picture of my cousin Ala and me getting ready to make up some more of our own ballet moves. I am the one with the broken neck who looks as though she needs to stop the performance and use the restroom. haha)

Some people might listen to this story and think of it as an early example of stubbornness. I like to see it more as a story about creativity and complete freedom. Now I find that this lack of inhibition and complete creativity that practically oozed out of me in my early years does not come as easily to me anymore. I do not write my own stories complete with crayon-colored illustrations and an “About the Author” with a Xeroxed copy of my most recent school picture on the back. At the age of 22 I find it easier to lose myself in a world that has been created for me rather than one I have conjured up on my own. I become attached to characters that I know I would have never met if Dan Brown had not created them and I become overtaken with emotion by the dire unthinkable circumstances of the blind victims in Jose Saramago’s The Blindness.

In less than a month I have read 3 books. My next book is The Inferno. Today after finishing Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris I thought to myself, “I have finished another book and I am looking forward to starting on the next one. Who am I? Where is that little ballerina with the broken neck who never liked to read? Did I leave her in Rome?” I think I will try to find a happy medium between being spoon fed new imagery from an author and creating my own new stories. Maybe mid-canto while reading Dante I’ll be inspired to take out a blank sheet of paper and quietly draw my own interpretation of my favorite scene.