Book of Life

   I started out loving to read.  I was thrilled when I found out I could take books home from the school library, which at first meant our elementary school teachers would let us sign books out from  the bookshelves in their classrooms.  Then a whole new world opened when I was old enough to go to the village library.  My mother was always scolding me to put that book down and go out and get some fresh air.  Later on, the high school library offered a whole new reason to delay doing homework: I found reading a book much more interesting than studying for a chemistry or physics test.  In college, there was so much assigned work that reading for pleasure had to be put on hold.  That was the reason I appreciated my literature classes; reading an assigned  novel was such a joy compared to the massive amount of text assignments for other courses.
   When I again had the opportunity to indulge in reading, after my kids were older because they resented my being lost in a book when they were little, I found that the magical aura that reading once brought had dissipated.  Some inevitable life losses had occurred by then, and I could not look on books as the same escape from reality as before.  I would begin the first chapters, in which the opening settings were mostly peaceful, with the characters living  a calm and normal life.  As the plot evolved, I knew the inevitable problems, conflicts, and disasters were going to disrupt the serenity of their lives, and I had little desire to undergo their misery along with them. Real life presented me with enough strife, so I would break my sacred rule of reading, which was to read every word of a book in order to claim readership of it:  I would skip ahead to the final chapter to see how the problems were resolved.  My suffering along with the characters was alleviated, but I lost the desire to read.
       Irony of ironies, the passage of time in real life has unfolded in the same way as the chapters of a book.  I recently attended a gathering of friends and acquaintances from the first chapter of my life, when the story was just beginning to unfold, and we, the characters, totally oblivious of how fortunate we were to be in the serenity of the present circumstance and completely unaware of the trials and tribulations in the future.   The chapters at the end of a book pay tribute to the opening chapters by serving as a resolution to the plot, of all that has transpired in the course of the story.   Oddly enough, after the passage of so many years, what is important to us is not  the resolution of  the issues and passions which consumed our lives over all those years.  Marriages, children, jobs, losses, acquisitions are not the topics of  our conversation.    Rather, we are more interested in recalling the essence of who we were then, in life's opening chapters.  The untold story is all that's happened through all those years, and at this point in time, for our purpose now, none of that really matters.