On Turning The Page

ON TURNING THE PAGE

BY MINA STERN

In fourth grade, I taught my best friend to read. I know this is factually true, but when he brings it up today and phrases it like this, I'm defensive.

He was not my friend before we started reading together. Actually, he was my enemy, because he was socially and athletically gifted, and I liked to read. It was elementary school, and the rules of that society, in case you've forgotten, are not exactly subtle. Our teacher, in a move that was perhaps ill-advised, set us up as reading partners and effectively asked one eight-year-old to tutor another. This should have been a disaster, but it worked out, if only because of my friend's inherent unflinching curiosity, which was stronger even than his pride or his prejudice (forgive me).

I have been a chronic re-reader since I first learned how. If it had been left up to me, I'm sure I would have readChrysanthemum again and again and never moved on. To this day, I will always reach for something I've already read over something new. I understand how little sense this makes—since each and every book I've come to love as a permanent companion was, at one point, brand-new and unknown to me. I used to religiously read the final page of a book before beginning it. I am trying now to stop doing this(since you can flip ahead all you like but you will never be able to change the ending). All the same, that is how unpleasant the unknown is to me, and how critical it is to avoid anything I cannot predict or control.

The situation of being alive, then, poses a problem for me and has often felt uncomfortable, at times almost impossible. I have no idea where I will end up next year, and the question overwhelms me so much I cannot begin to imagine myself anywhere, much less want myself anywhere.

I think this is why it is important to love people who are different from us and why some of life's terrible inexplicable randomness does have a point, after all, or at least a silver lining. A book you might not think to choose cannot actually leap off the shelf at you, but another person can fling themselves across your path. And for all my dread of the unknown, I know if there is any chance that someday when I reread these thoughts (as I am wont to do) and I am sitting in a completely different room, in a different life from when I first wrote them, it will be because of other people, whom I found so wonderful and so interesting that I fell in step with them in spite of myself.

And all those other people will be because of my very first friend, the little boy who called me a nerd and didn't want to learn to read. Because, much to my surprise, and perhaps for the best, it is much harder to close your heart again than it is to open it the very first time. And if the first person you love is the right kind of person, then more will follow. We are, it turns out, all of us, built to love. And so, it would follow, we're built to live. And if you're like I am and you sometimes struggle to feel curious about yourself or your own life,that's when you need only look up, at whoever walks beside you. If you're short on reasons, it's as good a reason as any to stick around, if only to know what comes next, for the people you love. Not to mention for all the people you will love who you haven't even met yet, the books you haven't read yet, the books you've yet to finish, and even the stories that made you feel so much, you need to start them again.

It can be difficult, among even the best of friends, not to keep score, when you've changed each other's lives so absolutely, and imperceptibly. So perhaps, in some definitive way, I taught Caplan to read. But he taught me all of this, again and again each day, every time he turned the page.