Last of the latch key kids, I grew up at the tail end of what is now called Generation X. No helicopter parents for us! We were the half-feral children told to go find something to do and to come home when the street lights came on.
Honestly, out of the house was better for me anyway. My stepfather was addicted to drugs. What should have been a mildly prosperous middle class home was instead plagued with unpaid power bills, TVs and stereos left at the pawn shop never to return, and periodic episodes of domestic violence.
Attuned to the rhythms of unhappiness, I could sense when another binge or blow up was about to happen the same way dogs get a little stir crazy when a thunderstorm is coming. On those days I would tell Mom I was leaving for the bookstore.
The bookstore was miles away on the far side of a divided highway, but it was probably safer and more comfortable there than at home.
Mom would tell me to take whatever books I wanted from a box by the door and send me on my way. If I kept a sharp eye out I might find a few glass bottles to trade into for a drink at the Magic Mart, which was the unofficial halfway point of my journey. I used the books, mostly murder mysteries and romances my mother called “bodice rippers”, as trade-ins for credit at the Book Exchange.
Long gone now, a victim of big chain bookstores and the online marketplace, the Book Exchange was an air-conditioned oasis of shelf upon shelf of paperbacks.
With the credit I got from those trade-ins I could travel all summer from the jungles of Tarzan to the swamps of Venus, to the strange cities of Kregen in orbit about distant Antares, and from the distant past to the post-apocalyptic future.
If the cover had dinosaurs, weird machines, warhorses, damsels in distress, or swordsmen and beast-men locked in mortal combat I bought it and took it home. Or if it was still too early yet, I hunted out a shady spot to sit and read.
Were the books violent? More often than not, yes. Did they sometimes have inappropriate material for a kid my age? Probably, but I was on the cusp of adolescence which made that material of great interest to me.
The key takeaway here is that these books were not a secret. I didn’t have to sneak them into the house or hide them under my pillow. My mother knew what I was reading and took great interest in it. Some of those books were her old favorites. More than all that, she trusted me.
Unfortunately, in the rush to protect children from any material that could be deemed objectionable (by well-intentioned people on both the left and right of the political spectrum) we also coddle them.
We inhibit their growth and the ability to make choices for themselves, often just when they need to start exercising it the most.
My mother and I both knew there wasn’t anything in those books more shocking than what was happening in our own home. At least in the books, the bad guys get theirs and the little guy wins sometimes.
So I say let people enjoy their escapism. Sometimes more truth is told with fiction than you might first suspect.
Most of all, trust your kids. If you’ve done your job right in raising them, then they will know they can come to you with any questions they have about something they read in a book.
• Greg O’Driscoll is a staff writer for The Blackshear Times.
