Before I could even read on my own, my mother would enroll my sister and me in a summer reading program hosted by our local library. When we were little we would write down all of the books my mother would read to us over the summer. When we had reached a certain number of books, we would receive prizes for our efforts. I remember my mother would doodle illustrations of the characters that inhabited our favorite stories of the summer in the margins of our reading programs. My favorite illustration was a large nose welcoming tiny swirls of steam from a warm mug. I still have many of those reading programs now – a record of my childhood.
At the end of the summer, we were awarded a new paperback. The librarians would unleash us on boxes piled high with new editions of a variety of books. My sister and I would comb through the boxes with a ferocity only matched by pirates being turned loose on a treasure cave. When I think back to that first reading program, when I could barely read, my past self had no idea what reading was going to give to her. My most memorable summer reading program was the summer of 2020. In a year of uncertainty, the reading program brought familiarity into my life and reignited my love of reading.
At the beginning of the lockdown, my sister and I acclimatized to our new situation by developing an almost military-esque ritual of waking up, exercising, school time, and then extreme boredom until it was time to go to bed and do it all over again. Have you ever seen one of those “Eat. Sleep. [insert sport/activity of your choice]. Repeat.” shirts? That would virtually explain our existence those first couple months. The days blended into each other like an abstract painting of news reports, school papers, home movie theater nights, and hitting foam tennis balls against the house.
Time moved in a curious way, as the minutes crept by, the days flew past. As the summer approached, questions bubbled to the surface of what I was going to do that summer. Now that I was a teen, the reading program was different. Prizes were given lottery-style with each 5 hours of reading earning you a ticket to put in the lottery of your choice. The library announced that the reading program would commence, online through an app. Excited, I eagerly registered for the program. Soon, I discovered myself beginning to read at a brisk pace, reminiscent of when I first started to read and devoured any book I could get my hands on. While the world I lived in was shaky and uncertain, the worlds I read about were glorious and predictable.
The summer drew to a close, I found myself finishing up the final book, recording my last few minutes of reading, and putting all of my lottery tickets into winning a three-month box subscription. Then I waited, waited, and waited. I assumed that if I had won the subscription, I would be alerted within a couple days, this was not the case. In fact, it wasn’t until two weeks post-reading program that I got any news. I was sitting in my backyard working on school. I had stopped obsessively refreshing my email about a week prior and was content to accept my prize-less fate, when suddenly I got a notification. I opened my mail app to an email from a librarian congratulating me on winning a 3-month subscription to a box service of my choice. The correspondence between the librarian and me were as follows:
I wrote, “Thank you. I would like the OwlCrate box subscription please.”
“There is a small hiccup – OwlCrate has a waitlist, would you rather be put on the waitlist or choose another box subscription,” the Librarian wrote back. Now, I could have been flexible and chosen a different box subscription, but I had already watched multiple OwlCrate unboxing videos on YouTube, so this was pretty much a done deal.
“I would like to be put on the OwlCrate waiting list please,” I responded. And then I waited three months. Three months isn’t a long time, unless you are waiting for an email informing you that a box full of bookish goods is on its way to you. In the meantime, I applied for my freshman year of high school and continued life. The anticipation of my prize helped motivate me in the first few months of high school.
A few months later, it came. On November 23rd I received my first OwlCrate box. It was a cardboard box stamped with a photo of an owl, it resembled the famous Harry Potter owl, Hedwig. Inside was a first edition copy of “Among the Beast and Briars” by Ashley Poston, a flower press, a dandelion necklace, and many more bookish goods. As I stared down at the box, with a stunned kind of expression, I was surprised by the anticlimactic nature of the event. These past few months I had spent in a constant state of intense expectation. I couldn’t figure out why I wasn’t happier, when by all accounts I should have been. I was struck by the fact that I wouldn’t have the waiting and expectation that I had grown accustomed to. In a way it was the waiting that helped me stay distracted and had given me predictability when the world seemed unpredictable.