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I have to speak about the man who really began my dream of becoming a writer and made my life long love affair with the fantasy genre abiding, and evergreen!
When I was young my mother would take me to the library and the book store. I doubt she even remembers. Being a child in an unhappy home, I am acutely aware of every one of the few happy memories that I did manage to sustain and hold onto in my life. One of the greatest things is that my mother while killing all of my other dreams did manage to instill her love of literature in me! My mother loved to read! When I was young, and she was at home instead of work I remember her doing only a few basic things. She would sleep, walk, swim, dance, laugh, cook, watch t.v., and read! It is her reading that sticks with me. The only time a book was out of her reach was when her current task at hand necessitated it! I remember most fondly when she would read to me at night! I as a little tyke would trot into her room carrying my latest book find and crawl into her bed. She would tuck me in beside her and the sad world around us would disappear into nothing but warmth. Then a new universe would explode around us and draw us in! In that universe which was vast and so full of different stories, many worlds were born and died, many lives were lived and lost! I had so many grand adventures and made so many new friends, and found so many hero’s to love!
Then one day while in the book store I discovered something that changed all of this! Something that solidified my love of books even more! I discovered Audiobooks! Oh my, what a delight! Books read for us, with talented story tellers who could do different voices, and who were backed up with music! Storytellers that could weave a tale in such a way that if it was possible made the stories come to life and seem even more real to me; if that were possible! I found a trilogy of books on audio! I still remember what store it was! Where I live, before Barnes and nobles was ever heard of down here, we had this terrific book store that I miss so very much! The store was Waldenbooks! Going there, or to the library was a lot like going to church for me! I had the same feeling of awe and wonder, and I could feel God there in the presence of all those peoples works; amidst their hopes and their dreams! It was like entering a new and Holy world each time; The western isles tolkein wrote of, or the fabled Aslan’s country as Lewis spoke of! That one day in Walden’s changed my life forever! I took my new find to my mother who laughed and bought them. That night I listened to my little cassette player, and let the story began to wave its magic around me and through me. This went on night after night till all the audio books were done. For those of you too young to know or remember, Cassette Tapes were what we had long before C.D.’s. They were little square things that fit into boxes and sound would magically come out! They were cool, and I loved them!
I don’t think my mother realized how many books I had read at the time, not only because they were in the school library, but because I did so love to read anything and everything. I don’t think she knew that I had already gone through many of the classics or was reading them currently in school! The Lord of The Rings, The Chronicles of Narnia, little women, and a never ending list of others! I liked to think of her bed as a ship that would transport me to that other universe. A ship that didn’t just sail the seas, but flew into the skies like peter pan’s fairie dusted ghost pirate ship! The trilogy finished, I moved on to other book series. I would crawl in bed with mom, and She would take whatever book I had and began reading it to me. As I have said, it is not that I couldn’t or didn’t read. I read and often. In fact movies and books were probably the biggest component in my life. And there was always music in the back ground! I did love my cassettes if you remember? But I guess she was my own form of audio book storyteller before I knew such a thing existed. I think I was around seven or eight at the time! It does get hard to remember things like dates and age! Any way, time wore on and eventually growing into adolescence the time of crawling into my mother’s bed ship faded into memory. After all big boys don’t get their mothers to read to them!
I think I was somewhere between eleven and thirteen at the time. I was in school, in my reading class looking over one of those school book list publications that we used to receive which told us about all the new wonderful books to buy for people our age! I loved those lists, though I am sure my family didn’t as I always asked for so many on the list and hard times had fallen on us by then! I was skimming through the titles and then all of a sudden one jumped out at me! I ordered the new book that very week! When it arrived, I began to read it. Later I would discover there were audiobooks for the entire series and get those as well! Suddenly feeling nostalgic and alright a little silly, I went to my mother who was in bed reading one night and I asked her to read to me like she did when I was little! She laughed and said “Ok, what are we reading”? I told her about my new book series obsession! She said she would read them all to me if I wanted! We laughed at how silly we were being! But true to her word she did end up reading three out of the four that were to come out! At the time it was a seven book series, and I had already read the original trilogy which I loved. Now I understand that the author has gone back and written twenty one or more! One day I hope to read all of those as well! She began reading the book to her preteen or teenage son and she grew a little worried at the nature of the book. She thought I was too young! I laughed and told her about other books that I had read! I left out that it was silly to worry about that when she took me to rated R movies when I was little! I also left out that by then I was an avid porn reader and watcher! So she read the books to me as they came out! At least the first three! I was able for a brief time to recapture something small and happy from my childhood!
By then life had grown all but unbearable! The kids at school sensed I was gay and began my daily torment and torture in my own private hell, and my father became increasingly abusive to all of us! My mother in her ignorance had already destroyed all of my other dreams. Especially my dream to become a ballerino. After all according to her whatever I wanted to do “only girls and fagots did that”! And no son of hers was going to be a sissy boy! She had always been sad that my aunt’s son was like a real boy. He loved doing “manly” things. He loved the military, and shooting guns, and playing sports! She would have rather he had been her son, and that my aunt would have gotten stuck with me! Though she will deny all of this now. Many years have passed. Many things have happened! She has come a long way since then, though she still has a long way to go! She still can’t accept that I am a gay man; in fact most of my ultra religious ministerial family like to deny this! At one point as a young teen I left home after a fight one day and announced that I was moving in with my grandparents who were and still are my refuge in life! My grandfather who was never like a father to me, was none the less a better example of man than I could have ever hoped for. My grandmother was and is my champion in life! They agreed to let me move in when after a fight one day where my father beat me, I went to the phone and called her after he and everyone else had left the house. I told her she had two choices, she could let me move in with her or I could kill myself! Needless to say I got a new home that day.
I packed a bag swiftly and ran out of the house, jumped the fence to our neighbor’s yard, and went through their back gate into the alley behind hour house. I disappeared down the ally and went to make some calls and get a ride! In my hurry I packed only a few changes of cloths and my favorite possessions. One group of possessions was my book series my mother had been reading to me! It was a large bag after all! Having that series to read comforted me, like I had an old friend and companion to travel with. After all, what I was going through wasn’t half as bad as what was befalling the people in the books! They gave me courage to carry on, and hope that one day things would get better! That first night in my grandmother’s house I was reading my book before bed, and that is when I knew that a new love and a new dream had been born in me! I wanted to be a writer! I wanted to give the chance to one little boy out in the world like me to have even half the hope that those books gave me! I didn’t know if I could write! I didn’t know if I had any talent for it whatsoever. I had learning disabilities and a host of other issues! But I knew that I wanted it, and I knew that I was great at writing poetry at the time. And art that seems to have sense left me! But I had a new dream; before I die I want to be a published author, and I want to give hope to at least one young boy out there, and being an avid movie fan, I want so very much for at least one of my books that I am working on to be made into a movie! I am an extremely visual person! The books that gave me this dream, this love I have for writing was The Shannara series, and The Author is the great story master Terry Brooks!
Thank you Terry Brooks for what you did for one little boy, and for this man who seems to have replaced him! Words can never capture what you did for me, but I am certainly going to use them to try!
http://www.terrybrooks.net/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shannara
http://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Official-Terry-Brooks-Page/168579946732
http://www.theworldofshannara.com/Main_Page
— with Terry Brooks Mater Storyteller and Author!
http://oddsends.i8.com/Brooks.html
http://www.artists.neherielart.com/main/cat/5/keith_parkinson/
http://www.keithparkinson.com/main.php
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