She’s asleep in the next room, just like the old days. My daughter is curled up in a pile of blankets while I type away as quietly as I can manage, hoping to not disturb her. She came out from Boston to check on me. A bit of a role reversal. But the help is welcome nonetheless.
It was often in the evenings, after she finally crashed back when she was little, that stories took root in my mind. They had been seeded earlier in the evening while reading aloud from Tom’s Midnight Garden, or The Magician’s Nephew, or Inkheart, or any of the hundreds of books we borrowed from the library back then.
Just because the reading stopped, the stories rarely went to sleep for either of us. They fed her dreamworld as well as my imagination. I read them with the same focus that a painter studies the brushstrokes of the masters.
This was an old habit drummed into me years earlier by Frank McCourt. Read good books; read them aloud; read them until you can taste the quality of the words; read them until you know why they taste of the quality they do.
The evening went on until my mind dissolved leaving me with only enough lucidity to shut everything down, turn off the lights, and stumble off to bed.