Read-A-Thon

11-17-99

It's November 17th, and we turned on the heat for the first time.

John and I came home tonight around 8:15, turned on the heat, and eschewed the TV for quiet time. Put the new Sting CD on the stereo and had Sustained Silent Reading. Brings back memories of second grade and seeing those upper case cursive S's on the board, and reading library books with plastic-sheathed covers.

We used to have Read-A-Thons at school, once a year. Every kid in the school would collect pledges, I'm not sure what the pledges had to do with anyone, but basically our parents and neighbors donated some money to the illiteracy fund. We brought our sleeping bags and wore pajamas and everybody camped out in the gym or the library, and the only rule was that you had to be reading a book. We ate sickeningly healthy snacks like ants-on-logs (peanut-buttered celery stalks with raisins) and tin cups of fruit cocktail.

The brown-tiled library floor was still super-hard under my Raggedy Ann sleeping bag. My Holly Hobby pillow case was tres chic, though. And my books were more advanced than anyone else's, and I had more of them. That was so important, to be seen reading Madeleine L'Engle when the other schmoes were reading Nancy Drew.

No wonder everyone thought I was a dumbass in grade school.

Read-A-Thon days were so special, because we had no classes at all, just recess and lunch and lying around in sleeping bags all day. There was one horrid Read-A-Thon day, though, when I was in second grade. For some reason they told us all to wear our Halloween costumes, even though the Read-A-Thon was in April. I came to school in my black witch dress with white knit tights. The day was normal until recess, when we went out and stood around keeping our costumes clean. There was this one kid who, every day, chased me all over the playground for some reason. Actually, there were two—one was Glen Johns and he asked me to marry him right around this same time. The unspoken idea was that if they caught me, I'd be on the receiving end of cootie-laden boy kisses.

So this guy whose name I didn't even know chased me on Read-A-Thon day, even though I was wearing pointy witchy shoes and a long skirt. Around and around the tall monkey bars until he backtracked, smacked into me, and sent me sprawling into an April Showers mudpuddle. Splat.

I spent the rest of Read-A-Thon Day with muddy-poopy-brown tights and mud all over my skirt. Bleh. That guy never chased me again, he was too embarrassed.

So, anyway, while having SSR with John tonight I was rereading Coupland's Generation X, in honor of his new novel that should come out in January (Thanks, Santa!!) I came across my favorite Coupland story, ever—the one about the apocalypse coming while the guy's in the grocery store—and my favorite ever line from any of Coupland's work, one of my favorite lines anywhere:

"And so then, just before the front windows become a crinkled, liquefied imploding sheet—the surface of a swimming pool during a high dive, as seen from below—"

I'd marry him, if I weren't already married.