When I was in fifth grade, we moved across town, and I was the new kid at school. I didn’t really fit in. I was too tall. My feet were too big. My clothes weren’t right. And I started going to the library every Tuesday after school with a friend of mine. My mother worked, so she couldn’t take me to the library on a regular basis. Her mother stayed home and took her every Tuesday, and I started going with them. I’m not sure why I fell into books, but I suspect it was because I was coping through them. They became redeeming to me, because I could escape into them. So that’s really when I got sort of obsessed with them and then spent most of my time riding my bike to a little branch library in East Bakersfield, and loading up my bike basket with books and coming home and spending an awful lot of time reading. But it was how I adapted to my new environment.
