Book Bound

Before Myles and I could read, our story had begun. In fact, our prologue was being written before we were even born. We were smiling down on our mothers who were taking notes in their elementary education lectures in college. I guess it wasn't time for the two of them to meet...yet.

Myles' parents bought the house he lived in as a boy with the satisfaction that they could read chapter books from the hallway to all of their kids tucked in bed at the same time. So, while his mother was reading Little Britches in Washington, mine was reading Little House on the Prairie to me in Illinois.

I had two goals as a girl: to become an Olympic gymnast and a published author. I started tumbling at the YMCA, and my first real story was The Pet I Want, written behind a big desk in first grade. My fourth grade teacher nicknamed me Ravenous Reader, and I got to meet a real, live author in junior high. After years of flip flopping and somersaulting, I eventually got too tall and too scared for the balance beams, but I never outgrew my love to write.

I was writing letters home to my family from the same university where our moms didn't meet when Myles and I did. He'd just come home from Brazil as a missionary, wondering about www's and dot coms. We started e-mailing each other for fun, beginning our first chapter.

(I am interrupted by Macy, who doesn't realize she doesn't make an appearance for several more chapters, asking me if she can please read just two more books, and then she'll go to sleep).

We are friends. We date. We break up. After a few chapters of Choose Your Own Adventure, we decide to begin Our Own Adventure together again, this time for the rest of our lives.

My mom meets Myles, lugging boxes of my journals from home "Since you'll have your own place now." (Little did she know, we'd be renting a studio apartment and would have to store them in someone else's basement).

We didn't choose certain colors for our wedding, but our moms are still on the same page; they both show up in forest green dresses. We dance. We watch Grandma and Grandpa dance...for the last time. Myles plays his guitar, singing a love story to me.

We travel, and then I write for a newspaper for free so I can graduate. His granddad tells me his stories, mostly hunting stories, and I finish his book for him and his family before he dies, sometime when Robyn is a baby.

I would find her asleep in her crib with a board book as her pillow...asleep in her bed with a book on top of her face. Once she was into chapter books, I finally figured out why it was so important to her that we replace the batteries in our flashlight. It was the day I was changing her sheets.

Since reading Yellow Star, a true story of a child who survived the Holocaust, she is thankful for things like sheets in her prayers. She is growing with her books. I find her on the couch in the mornings, either reading one or writing one.

While reading Yellow Star with her, I was reading The Hunger Games on my own, questioning how people could be so cruel in reality past as well as in a fictional future. I think people should have learned by now. People should be getting better, not worse. I open the newspaper to find a headline about Nigerian bloodbaths shouting at me.

Myles brings the paper home from campus for me everyday, where he writes his dissertation so he can be a professor some place, some day where two future fathers will be taking notes.