I have this one vivid memory from when I was little.  It was in the evening, and my mom had taken me to the library.  She took us often, which I am thankful for still to this day. I walked up to the librarian excitedly and asked her with hope in my eyes if they had a copy of The House of Dies Drear on the shelf. When the answer was no, I walked away sadly.  I was eleven. And my sixth grade social studies teacher, Mrs. Sieffert was reading excerpts of the book to us in class that had to do with the unit we were studying.  I hated just getting the excerpts and I wanted to read the whole thing.  There was another one about Mesopotamia that I remember asking about too.  Riveting material, folks.  I was the eleven year old nerd who ran into the public library and asked the librarian about this and that and the other thing.  I  was the eleven year old who was reading The Island of the Blue Dolphins for the third time,  who loved The Witch of Blackbird Pond, Maniac Magee, White Fang and a slew of other books that most kids would’ve probably found totally boring, and who still claims that The Giver is one of her favorite all time reads.  I have a love of books that is buried deep down within my soul.  And the love began when I was little.

And so we pray for the same thing for our children.  For a love of reading.  We try to bring them to the library as much as we can, which these days seems way less than in the past.  But we allow them to choose books that peak their interest and don’t really give them a limit on what they can check out.

And that my friends, is where the curse comes into play.  The twenty-one day curse.

You know how long you can keep a book out at our library?  Three weeks.  That’s wonderful.  That’s plenty of time to read it a few times.  Plenty of time to keep it up on the shelf near their bed and for them to have something to read in the morning before they can get out of bed.  Plenty of time to get lost in the shuffle of life and have it’s existence completely forgotten.  Just conveniently long enough to make us forget that we have twenty books checked out that are ohmygoodnessduefourdaysago! And four days times twenty books times fifty cents each is a hefty chunk of change.  So we must be vigilant in these parts.  To check out account every so often to see what we have out.  To renew our stuff.  And renew again since we can’t seem to locate everything.  And finally when that fateful day comes when we’ve had a few things for NINE weeks and have reached our renewing limit, we scour the house and find one here and one there and one in a very unlikely spot, and we race to the library before closing lest we have to forgo another fifty cents of our precious money.  And so we begin again. And promise ourselves that this time will be better.  And it is!  And then we get lazy once again.  And such goes the cycle in our house.

And don’t even get me started on movies.  Seven days goes by WAY faster than you may think . . .