Books As (Brain) Comfort Food
by Timothy Singleton on Jul.21, 2010, under Bear's Book Blog, Fiction
When I was a kid, books tended to be my comfort food for some reason. Summer was not just a time to be free from the drudgery of the demands of folks who for the most part wound up as teachers because they wanted three months vacation every year and had the imaginations on par with a creek rock; it was a time when you could get lost in the library without time pressures and spend whole days under a fan mentally projecting yourself into all kinds of other worlds.
One of my favorites was Freckles. Simply put I saw myself as Freckles the protagonist and spent hours mooning over the Limberlost Angel, who in my mind bore a striking resemblance to a classmate named…
Freckles was at once the forlorn lowest point of any triangle socially but also possessed the character of a hero and, despite all his scars and, in his mind, unattractiveness, had some quality that his Limberlost Angel could not live without. It is not an overstatement to say that had a door opened into that world with me stepping into Freckles, you would not be reading this post and I would be looking back at you from the pages of a book and moving on to whatever future fictional characters must by definition move on to in our universe driven by probability and quantum mechanics.
Freckles is on my radar to read again and soon, for what number of times I could not tell you because I simply read and reread the book from somewhere around the 7th grade all the way through high school.
I find such stories comforting because it proves that even if humanity is not always divine, it is at least striving to attain divinity.
