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By Shane Gilreath
Sunday night tends to be my great nemesis. I’ve never been a great sleeper, but Sunday is the night my mind is most active and I chew on issues that are mostly irrelevant (even in the face of the last few months which have not been anywhere near ideal). Perhaps, that’s why I’ve gone back in time a bit, as is often my retreat. Some time ago, I wrote about a fictional story – cheesily titled, Murder in the County – that I constructed as a sophomore in high school for Mrs Edwina Walker, saying that I still pull it out from time to time. I’ve done that a bit of late – mostly trying to read and research myself to sleep – but given its setting, I was far too easily taken away. After all, speakeasies are a powerful thing and the Twenties are a place of fascination. Just as on Sunday, over the years, I’ve crawled down rabbit holes with F. Scott Fitzgerald, revisited parties at Gatsby’s, saw Paris with Hemingway, and explored the Hollywood bungalow of murdered film director William Desmond Taylor. This weekend, as I completed that Roaring Twenties adventure, surrounded by research that had engulfed by bed, I began to think of all the books I’ve experienced in my life, their settings, and how each has impacted me in ways I wasn’t sure I knew or understood. I was introduced to the Taylor murder via a book. Gatsby and Fitzgerald go without saying. “A library is a hospital for the mind,” Alvin Tiffler said, and I believe it. A book can take you anywhere in the world to do anything, and it didn’t take a childhood ‘choose your adventure book’ for me to learn it. Most every night, when I was a kid, one of my parents would read me a bedtime story. The multitude could range from Little Golden Books, so memorable to me, to war stories, which I loved, to the writers who make up the bulk of Southern literature, who I grew to love even more. In these ways, I had an idyllic childhood, in an idyllic setting, even if things weren’t always, themselves, idyllic. Perfect, by no stretch, as no life can be, but there were moments it felt so. My father’s favorite author was Jesse Stuart, whose prolific work on Kentucky left an unending influence, and he often read Stuart to me as a bedtime story. In those moments, I am sure, were sewn the seeds of love. Adventures to the library became commonplace. As my own girls were growing up, I tried to keep that tradition: by then, I was reading a big, pink book of Disney Princess stories, coupled with Harry Potter and Binya and Ponyo, and even once, by their own selection, Sarah Palin’s “Going Rogue.” If it was good enough for grown-ups, surely, they must have thought, it was good enough for them. They, too, would nestle closely as I read aloud to my late grandmother; maybe flipping on furniture, but ever present and aware. As we prepare to celebrate Father’s day, I’m grateful for those days and those munchkins. I miss those moments as if they’re my very breath: Kaitlyn’s persistent bed jumping, Jenna’s phone recordings, and Bailie’s infectious giggle were among the best days of my life. Be warned, Moms and Dads, no matter how hard you try, they don’t last (or stay little) forever. I’m grateful, too, that my own parents took the time to read to me when I was small. The love of the written word has carried me along the way. It’s given me an outlet when life hasn’t been so idyllic, including on sleepless Sunday nights when my mind wants to wonder and I find, myself, in need of the perfect bedtime story.