You fixed my hair...while we stood under the DQ sign at Union Station

While you worked, I read about the crunched up pieces of Oreo cookies they mix into some of their DQ ice cream concoctions. Not being much for ice cream, I was not tantalized and mostly didn’t read the description. I actually turned away from the picture of the brown one with darker brown bits…

I wanted to think more about my experience of reading DQ - not the frothy frozen confection/brazier burger/oreo bit DQ – but the one who is currently (in my reading experience) caged in a cart by “demons” (really all of his well-wishers from the inn) and being carried back to his village to be “cured” of his madness. And all this because he read a few too many books…

How much am I subject to this same kind of madness?

When I was a teenager I remember being accused of this madness by my cousin’s stepfather who was a chores guy. He spent all of his spare time doing odd jobs around the house and yard. I liked to read – mostly twentieth century American fiction at the time – and he was very offended by my propensity to “sit around” and read while there was “work to be done”. Awkwardly, I couldn’t explain to him that reading was work too…not that that really occurred to me at the time…that my teenage reading was important work for me. I just looked like a lazy slob to him…with no future…a kind of madness for someone like him who measured worth in different ways. He liked my boyfriend though. My boyfriend knew how to do things and didn’t particularly like to read. Now that I think about it, I don’t really remember him ever reading anything…