I have no memory of my parents ever reading a book to me. What I do remember vividly was the magic of the children’s books that I read to my son when he was young. They were as new to me as they were to him. Some seemed to illustrate important life lessons, especially Winnie-the-Pooh.

Up until Jesse was about three years old, I read him books with plenty of pictures, like the Dr. Seuss books and The Very Hungry Caterpillar. But Winnie-the-Pooh and his diverse companions in the Hundred Acre Woods hit a magic button for both us. Around the time we read the book, we also watched the classic movie, Pooh and the Honey Tree, singing along with Pooh from our living room sofa. Jesse patted his stomach when Pooh felt a “rumbly” in his tummy. Then, on TV each Saturday morning, we watched The New Adventures of Winnie the Pooh. On one occasion, he said, “I want to go to Pooh’s house.” 

I said, “Where does Pooh live?” 

He pointed to the woods behind our house. I told him we might not find Pooh there, but that I was willing to help him look.

As I remember Jesse’s Pooh fantasies, I regret sometimes that I helped perpetuate them. Not that it was bad for a child to have fantasies about a sweet group of characters. But from a realistic standpoint, Pooh is a bear who consumes large quantities of sweets (honey) and is a poster child for the nation’s campaign against child obesity. Pooh rarely runs anywhere, lies around a lot, and says “Oh, bother” when things don’t go his way. I’m really glad Jesse did not enter kindergarten saying things like “Oh, bother.” Eeyore’s depression is probably a result of PTSD from having his stick house knocked down so many times, making him a poster child for the nation’s reliance on antidepressants. Rabbit is bossy and puts forth plans that would never make it through the United States Congress. Piglet stutters and is abnormally anxious and could probably benefit from psychiatric counseling to deal with his inferiority complex. Tigger, whose personality our leaping boy most resembled, is too bouncy and probably needs to learn to be more introspective. Kanga and Roo have mother/child issues that revolve around Roo’s refusal to leave the nest (mother’s pouch, in this case) and forge an independent life. Owl is the intellectual who rarely gets involved. As for Christopher Robin, he is a kid who carelessly leaves his stuffed animals scattered all over to the extent that these dorky creatures have had to come to life and fend for themselves. I suppose the redeeming quality of the group is their friendship and desire to help one another. But really, they are a dysfunctional outfit that should not serve as role models for small children.

Even though he enjoyed having his mom and I read to him, it took some perseverance on our part to get Jesse interested in reading fiction. As he matured, his personal reading tended toward instructions on how to get Pokémon characters to evolve, how to build a model airplane, how to use flight simulator software on his mother’s new (and fast) Pentium II computer, how to build robots described on the Lego website. But Shelley and I continued to read fiction to him at bedtime, and finally found books that, at the end of our reading sessions, made him say, “Don’t stop now!  You can’t stop now!  Please?” Joanne Rowling (Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone) and Louis Sachar (Holes) provided us with wonderful characters and gripping plots. I think we read all seven of the Harry Potter books. Later we got caught up in October Sky (the book and movie), the true story of a ‘50s teenager from a West Virginia coal mining town who wants to become, against all odds, a rocket scientist like Werner Von Braun.

When Jesse was a toddler, I gave him his bath each night, and Shelley read him a bedtime story. But there came a time when he insisted that “Mama” should give him his bath. Having been rejected at bath time, I took over reading of the bedtime stories. Despite his enthusiasm for the books I read, he insisted that one of the stories be a new made-up story from my imagination. One night he said, “Daddy, does your head hurt?” I asked why he said that. He said, “So many books inside your head.” What hurt was the pressure to think up a new story each night. Often I felt stuck at “Once upon a time,” a side effect perhaps of the tired mind, or just a depleted imagination. But in retrospect, even though I can’t remember a single one, those imaginative stories may be among my favorites, because I can remember that there were enough inside my head to recall the joy of being with Jesse when my fantastic tales emerged.

…

In third grade he learned cursive writing, how to write a short essay, and how to read chapter books (all words, no illustrations). His teacher even gave his reading group some book report assignments. Shortly after he’d read a couple assignment books, he said, “Dad, when can I read the book you wrote?” 

“I wrote the book for teenagers. You’d understand it better in a couple years.” 

“I’d like to try to read it now.”  A few days later, after supper, he said, “Where’s your book?” 

I told him, he retrieved it. He asked questions about the cover, read the title page, read the dedication page, and said, “Who’s Alexandra?” 

“My ex-wife.” 

“How many ex-wives do you have?”

HOW MANY??  Is this kid a lawyer?  “Just one.” 

“Why do you have an ex-wife?” 

“Because we didn’t get along very well. So I got divorced and eventually met Mama.” 

“Where does she live?” 

“I don’t know. Last I heard she lived in Washington State.” 

He proceeded to read the first two pages out loud, while Shelley and I winced at some of the teenage slang. He then inserted a bookmarker, closed the book, read my name on the book jacket, and said, “Are you famous?” 

“No. Some authors who sell a lot of books are famous, but most authors are not famous.” 

“Is your book in the library?” 

“It was there the last time I was at the library.” 

So that’s what he told his teacher the next day — that his father had a book in the library. He said to me, “Mrs. Coleman would like to borrow a copy of your book.” 

“Did you tell her it was for teenagers?” 

“I told her it was for ages thirteen and up.” 

So I gave him a book to take to his teacher. When he returned from school, I said, “Did she ask you any questions about the book?” 

“Yes.” 

“Did she ask you who Alexandra was?” 

“Yes.” 

“What did you tell her?” 

“I told her she was one of your ex-wives.”

One of many. Maybe a dozen. “I only have one ex-wife.” 

“Oh, yeah,” he said.

…

Just before his first year in high school, he said, “Why do I have to read three books this summer? None of the other English classes have to read three books.” The summer assignment for those students recommended for freshman Honors English was My Antonia, The King Must Die, and Cyrano De Bergerac. Because he read only technical material and motocross magazines of his own volition, being forced to read three difficult pieces of literature seemed like a summer in hell. He complained, “They’re going to test us on those books the first day back from vacation.”  I think it didn’t seem fair to be tested on books without classroom discussion first. So Shelley and I said we’d read the books with him and discuss them as a family. In response to our daily coercion for him to read, he said, “My Antonia is boring.”

After about twenty pages of The King Must Die, he said, “I can’t understand anything in this book.” I translated the pseudo ancient Greek style into a summary that he could understand.

He had trouble with Cyrano too, but Shelley and Cliff Notes helped him through that one.

The test came on the second day of ninth-grade Honors English. He came home and said, “Mrs. Goldsmith said that anyone who got less than 84 on the test should think about getting out of this class.” 

“How do you think you did?”

“Not very good.” He sighed. “Dad, what was the bull’s name in The King Must Die?”

“Hercules.”

“How was I supposed to remember that?” It was an obscure tidbit, mentioned once. “Dad, in My Antonia, who was the person who died in Russia?  Was it Ordinsky?”

“I don’t remember.”  I looked it up. “No, Ordinsky was the Polish violinist who lived in the room across the hall from Lena Lingard in Lincoln, Nebraska.” 

“Oh mannn…” 

On the next school day, with our blessing, he had the guidance counselor switch him from Honors English to Academic English. If teachers were supposed to inspire fourteen-year-olds to read “great” literature, his school had failed miserably.

…

Later in high school, Jesse decided that a dad could be an asset if he read Silas Marner with him and explained events in a book that suffered from a convoluted writing style. After getting a 60% on a five-question Silas Marner quiz, he came home and said, “Dad, will you read the next Silas Marner chapter and quiz me on it?”

I looked at the chapter in question. “The author’s first sentence is almost as long as the page.”

“And you know my weakness is reading comprehension.”

“I can never understand how you comprehend technical material so well and have so much trouble with fiction.” Although, with Silas Marner, I had to read some sentences three times before either understanding them or falling asleep. But quizzing him helped. His quiz grades rose. My happiest days that autumn were when Silas Marner and Jesse’s motocross racing were finished. When his English teacher requested that the class present a novel for independent reading, he had no clue. I told him about a gripping survival story, Deliverance, thinking a fast plot would stimulate his interest. He read the book, and we watched the movie. He still thought there were better things to do than read fiction.

I said, “James Bond movies are fiction.”

He said, “That’s different. Besides, I don’t have to read James Bond.”

…

Writing a school essay, like taking out the trash, evoked the disguised will-you-help-me question: “I don’t know what the thesis should be for my essay, and the essay’s gonna count for one half of my final exam grade in English.” 

On my suggestion, he had read Stephen King’s memoir On Writing, so I said, “Why don’t you write about what influenced King to become a writer?” So he wrote a half-hour outline that convinced me he was day-dreaming when he read the book. I said, “There must have been more than this.”

“That’s all I remembered.”

“You’re supposed to go back through the book and highlight the main points.”

“Maybe I’ll do that later.”

He knew he could suck me in with his procrastination. Thinking if I showed him just once how to review, I skimmed through the book and highlighted in yellow where little Stephen had read for a year when he was sick in bed, and how his mother’s reaction to a copied comic-book story was, “Write one of your own, Stevie. Those Combat Casey funny-books are just junk — he’s always knocking someone’s teeth out. I bet you can do better. Write one of your own.” And how his working mother gave him twenty-five cents apiece for his first four original stories and bought him a Royal typewriter when he was eleven. I pointed out my highlights and asked him how he’d missed King’s mother. He said, “I don’t know.”

“King’s father ran off when he was two. His mother raised the family alone. She was a huge influence.”

He nodded. “Thanks, Dad.”

…

After high school graduation, his last English teacher e-mailed us her startling opinion of the man-child who was averse to reading books that the school had assigned: “Jesse is a rare breed that mixes unassuming charisma with unassuming raw intelligence. I’ve met very few people of his caliber, and his acquaintance reaffirms why I teach.” What was  puzzling was that she’d brought her husband and two small children to one of his motocross races and observed the “rare breed” in a convoluted sport that had nothing to do with books except for the user manual of a Yamaha YZ125.

Did he converse differently with adults who weren’t his parents? Had he discussed with her some comprehensive books that we were not aware of? What had she seen that we hadn’t?

I guess he had to read many books to attain his Master’s Degree in Computer Science and become a software engineer for a prestigious company. And to understand all of the regulations that allowed him to attain his pilot’s license last year. But I don’t think any of the books were fictional or philosophical…unless there is some philosophy in Jesse taking his anxious dad up for a flight and allowing me to write an article for the Boston Globe about the loving connection between a father and son that began long ago with the reading of books.

– Kurt Schmidt