Lindsey Markel Writes About True Things

I must have been around five years old the first time I thought about the universe. I’d easily swayed my mother into buying a set of Childcraft encyclopedias from the salesman who had shown up at our door (a rare visit for our rural farmhouse). I stayed up late to read about volcanoes and examine the timeline of the world, ponder the extinction of the dinosaurs before falling asleep. Before I had been taught to fear math, I read excerpts from a book where a boy and his watch-dog eat subtraction stew and meet a Dodecahedron; The Phantom Tollbooth was my first favorite book when I read it in full a few years later. I begged Mom to buy tempera paints, the main ingredient in most of the crafts in Make and Do. They sounded exotic, my first non-Crayola medium; Mom had to stop at a special store to buy them.

And in one of the editions—either Our Earth or Who We Are—I read about reincarnation for the first time. There was a picture of a young, pretty Indian girl, and over the shadowed part of the photo, it said in white text that this girl and her family believed that after we die, our spirits are born again into the bodies of different creatures. It said this just as the caption next to the white girl in red-ribboned pigtails had said that she believed in God, like my family did, and that she believed that she would go to Heaven, as I was taught in Sunday School.

It didn’t frighten me to think about reincarnation, nor do I remember feeling surprised that a girl and her family in India—a country so foreign it might as well have been a different planet—could believe something so fundamentally different from me. Maybe it was the widening of the world that did it. Maybe it was considering the idea of reincarnation and finding it kind of comforting and nice—maybe I’d been Cleopatra in a former life! Maybe I’d be a kitty in a future one! Maybe every child reaches a point where we realize our own consciousness. Something about reading in my Childcraft book that day made me sit back on the scratchy orange nap of the couch and think about what being alive really meant. It meant a present moment, which meant thinking about the present moment even as I was present in it. It meant a working system, a universe that had a beginning, which also meant a likely end.

For a girl who was living in a house of four, sharing the zip code with a town of 207 people, who would go on to graduate high school in a class of 28, these were important thoughts to be thinking.

A friend of mine recently shared with me that her little brother, an eighth grader who also goes to school in a small Midwestern town, was encouraged by his school reading teacher to read more “classic” books. He’d been devouring a string of advanced sci-fi and fantasy novels, so he brought a copy of Watership Down to class. She shelved it, having never heard of the book before. Then she assigned him to begin the Left Behind series, boasting titles like Assassins: Assignment: Jerusalem, Target: Antichrist and Kingdom Come: The Final Victory. When he claimed to be unfamiliar with the term “Rapture,” she was appalled.

Maybe by the end of this century, books will be totally defunct. Maybe kids will be able to learn by computers mimicking tactile experience, like in The Veldt (read to us by our sixth-grade reading teacher and never forgotten by me). We still have books. Go to the library and let your children wander. Buy paper books with hard covers and beautiful illustrations. Read them to your kids, then leave them alone in a room together. Reading about reincarnation at a young age didn’t throw me headlong from Sunday School to Hinduism the same way reading about Milo and Tock’s visit to the Mathemagician didn’t give me any automatic A’s on my timed multiplication tests. But exploration teaches empathy. It encourages rather than disheartens. I used to stay up late, worrying about about the dinosaurs.

(Originally published on youareamongfriends.com)