Book Nerd

The first day of kindergarten did not go well for me. I still don't know if it was my haircut, my last name, or the ridiculous striped shirt my mother dressed me in that did it, but from that day onward I was lumped in with the outcasts. I remember seeing some of the other kids playing in the back half of the room near the huge bin of red cardboard bricks. They had built them into some sort of fort and were staging a battle with G.I Joe's atop of them all. I walked over, eager to join the fun even though my own action figures were at home, safe in their carefully labelled Tupperware containers, and asked if I could play too. They asked my name. I told them. A few snickered. I was offered Scarlet with a smirk. "Here, you can play with the girl." Much laughter. My face grew red. I was a nerd from there on out.


At a big school you may have the chance to grow out of your early role. Every year brings the chance that they will put you in with another group of kids, or that the district will redraw the lines sending you across town, or that the bullies will grow tired of tormenting you and move on to the foreign kid with the odd smell and funny accent. But I did not go to a big school. I went to a small catholic school on the south side with the same 40 kids from kindergarten through seventh grade. It sucked.

Being a nerd was new to me, interacting with kids outside of my family was new to me, and it took me quite some time to figure out just what you were supposed to do while being a nerd. It wasn't my fault that I didn't catch on quick; it was that the other nerds weren't much help. A couple were your classic, thick glasses, high-water pants variety. Good at math and science. Couldn't throw a ball properly. Physically and socially awkward. I didn't really fit in with them at all. This was back before my eyes started to go bad, so bonding over the perils of keeping your glasses safe while being tortured for your lunch money was out. Likewise, I was not very good at math; a sad fact that has dogged me through adulthood. So being the traditional, stereotypical nerd was out. A couple of the others were into hockey. It doesn't seem like this would banish you to the ranks of the perennially unpopular, but at our school football was king. I had more in common with these kids, but I did not play hockey. It was way too expensive for the son of a cop and a private music teacher, or so I was told. There were a few others here and there: the poor kid, the kid who smells funny, the aforementioned foreigner. And it was not limited to boys. No No, there were outcasts among the girls as well, but their society was as closed to me then as it seems to be today.

So there I was. Left to fend for myself. Discovering what it meant to be one of childhood's undesirables. Despite not being very good at math or science, I excelled at reading. This was in the days when they would group you according to ability. The good readers, most of us nerds, were given actual books to read. The slow readers were given Hop on Pop. I quickly found that reading was the best, and sometimes only way, to escape from the uncomfortable situation I found myself in. Pledge of Allegiance. Attendance. Math class. Getting flicked in the ear with a pencil. Science. Getting hit in the neck with a spitball. Lunch. Sitting alone. Recess. Getting pushed off the swings so someone else could use them. But then, after lunch, silent reading time. This was my refuge. This was what made the day worthwhile. A half an hour to sit at my desk and forget all of the crap around me.

So, instead of trying to puzzle out the reasons behind my unpopularity, I retreated into books. It started with the terrible Matt Christopher books, which would let me imagine myself as an athletic kid who hits the game winning home run or scores the touchdown in overtime. From there it was on to Nancy Drew, the Hardy Boys, and Encyclopedia Brown, where I could imagine myself solving crimes in my neighborhood. A big evolution happened when I snuck away from the young adult section of my school's tiny library and discovered the classics. Sherlock Holmes, Moby Dick, and Great Expectations were all on my reading list in the third grade. Melville's tome was responsible for me getting called to the principal's office that year and being accused of pretending to read it, as the teacher and aforementioned principal could not get their heads around an eight year old reading page after page about the rendering of whale fat. But, I was reading these books, and while I may not have comprehended a few of the words or grasped half of the symbolism, I loved them. They were my friends in ways that the kids around me were not.

My love of books has stuck with me through adulthood. Science fiction like the Star Wars novelizations and Issac Asimov got me through middle school. Kerouac and Bukowski, through high school. Pablo Neruda and Allen Ginsberg got me through a particularly bad streak of romantic disasters in college. And, as incongruous as it may sound, J.R.R. Tolkien helped me through Iraq. In between I have read more books than I can ever hope to remember; in genres ranging from sword and sorcery to the Greek Classics. They still remain my refuge. They still help me escape the trials and troubles of everyday life. They still hold their magic.

I hope they always will.