When I was fourteen...

When I was fourteen I was just learning how to live.

For years - ever since I was 6 and first learned how to read, I had kept my nose stuck in a book.  I would read in the morning at breakfast (thank you Amy Carter), on the bus, at school - even walking down the hall between classes. Once I got home from school, and my homework was done - it was back to the tomes.  I would read in the living room while my brothers watched TV. I would read in the car as my family went on trips. I would read at night, under the covers with a flashlight, until my eyes could no longer stay open.

In other words, my life was a book. I didn't live, I existed between the cardboard covers of the adventures I read, coming up for sustenance only as required by outside forces.  My mom tells me that the teachers would talk to her at every parent teach conference about how they were concerned for me because I didn't speak - and would disappear between the pages every chance I got.

The summer after 7th grade I was blessed by the powers that be. My parents decided to send my brothers and me to summer camp for two weeks.  Books weren't on the list of things to bring, so they didn't get packed into the old army trunk my Mom packed for me.  I remember the first day at camp; I didn't know what to do or say.  There were girls all around me talking and laughing, but I didn't know how to participate, and watched.  Eventually they reached out to me and brought me, blinkingly into their world.

I learned to hike and see the trees, I learned to swim with others and enjoy playing in the water, I learned how to canoe and keep it from tipping over.  I learned to sneak and laugh and gossip. I ate and talked and laughed and LIVED for the first time with other kids my age. I even found my first 'boy friend' at camp that summer.  Although, we broke up soon after, as he wanted to kiss me, and I thought that was going 'too far'. 

I remember sneaking away from camp one night with my girl friends to walk to the nearby, so-called, "Indian burial mounds" where we had gone looking for arrowheads earlier in the week.  We thought that if we went alone perhaps we had a greater chance of finding the arrowhead that had eluded us on the first trip.  It never occurred to us that trying to find arrowheads in the dark, might not be the easiest thing to do.  Once there, we were too squeamish to even start to dig, listening to the sounds around us (night life in the Michigan woods) was enough to send us back to our cabin almost before we started.  But, at least I was living life - and I knew it.

Once I got back home, I reverted to my old habits - and spent the rest of the summer buried in Judy Blume and other racy places.  But when school started back in the fall, I realized I wanted what I had at camp.  I desperately wanted to LIVE. I also came to the harsh realization that it was my books that kept me back.  I made a promise to myself that during that school year, I could NOT bring a single book to school.

It was really scary to start the year without my crutch.  I had to start to look at other people, interact with others, and neither of us were used to it.  For the entire 8th grade year I went to school without a book.  I was able to make 2 good girl friends that year -- which may not seem like much, but it was all I could do, and I felt successful.

By 9th grade, I knew I could do it - and went to school again without my books.  I remember getting in trouble in one class for talking too much.  The teacher thought he was punishing me by putting the little note on my report card that I was "being too social in class" -- My parents took me out to dinner to celebrate.  By the end of 9th grade I had many friends, and was active in many different areas of school and life.  

I will always look back on that 7th grade summer as the START of my life though.  The two weeks where I learned that LIFE doesn't happen between the pages, but only when the words were put aside, and I jumped outside the imaginary worlds created by others, that I could find the life that I wanted and needed.