F E AT U R E
Sandwiches as an ‘Excuse’ for Literacy Month. BY WYATT BANDT
To call childhood me a bookworm would have been an understatement. I devoured books, and the only thing that (sometimes) stopped me was my vocabulary. I have a vivid memory of my parents leaving on a vacation during the summer, so my brother and I were at home with a sitter for four days. In preparation, I checked out a stack of books from the library and carefully piled them in the living room where I did most of my reading. By the end of the first day, I finished three novels. The pile was ‘empty’ sometime the third day. I owe my love of literature and writing in a large part to my mother. Growing up, she read to us over lunch, one of the best parts about being homeschooled. She read my brother and me classics and contemporary novels while we munched on sandwiches and pretzels. A favorite was the Sebastian Darke series, a story about a young man who inherited his father’s jester business and travelled about the countryside with his talking and melodramatic buffalope, Max. My mom voiced all the characters, and her rendition of Max sounded a lot like Boo-Boo from Yogi Bear, just a lot more baritone. I was surprised with how much I missed when I reread Lord of the Flies as an adult, and we gave up reading A Tree Grows in Brooklyn as a lunchtime book, but my mom encouraged me to read it on my own. It’s now one of my all-time favorites, and if I 72
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