Holding the Page (original)

Holding the Page

            The only object I have from my mother is a bookmarker.  It's about two inches long; the kind you clip between pages.  Brand new, it looked shiny and gold, but now the metal is giving way to rust.  At the top is the letter "P" for my mother's name, Patricia.  I actually hate to use it.  Not because I hate to think about her but because the bookmarker sticks out too much. When I bump it, the pages get ripped.  You can spot which books I've used it on with one glance of my bookshelf.  I stopped using bookmarkers to identify where I left off.  Instead, I would mark certain places of the book that I enjoyed or passages that gave me feeling.

            My mother encouraged reading in our house.  Each night before bed, we would turn off the TV and run up to find a book.  Like any kid, I went through the phases.  I was read to, I followed along, I picked up a few words and then I was off on my own.  We started with Dr. Seuss, Curious George, and the Berenstain Bears.  I then moved up to Encyclopedia Brown.  My mother took me to a book signing by Donald Sobol so I could get his latest novel, Encyclopedia Brown and the Case of the Mysterious Handprints, signed.  I made sure he signed my copy of his first novel as well.

            Each time I went to my parent's room to read, I would spot a new book on my mother's nightstand.  Most times, the author was the same – Stephen King.  I remember walking in at the age of ten and seeing his latest novel.  The cover was black.  In giant red letters was the author's name.  The Tommyknockers, read below in white, just above a picture of an eerie green light.  I picked up the book and saw this gold bookmarker protruding from the pages.  I asked my mom what the book was about.  She told me it was a scary story that I was too young to read.  I was still curious so I flipped through the pages.  I was lost.  I may have been too young to read something so scary, and my vocabulary was not what it needed to be to even begin to read this novel.

            I began to have a fascination with her bookmarker.  Each time she read a book from the library, there is was holding pages together, waiting to make its way to the end of the story.  My only bookmarkers were whatever free slips of paper the library was giving out by the counter.  When my mom would finish a book, she would leave the bookmarker on the nightstand where I would find it and use it until she was into her next tale of horror.  Sometimes she would let me keep it through a whole book of my own.  Seeing this gold 'P' stand out from the large novels she read did not compare to the look of using it on my one hundred page kid's books.

            Each month my school would hand out fliers for book orders.  I would always pick out around ten.  My mom would pick out two.  I was at the end of the 5^th grade.  Summer was about to begin so my mom ordered something for me to read until my graduation into the 6^th grade – middle school.  Looking over the flier, I spotted a familiar name.  I was excited because the flier was telling me I was old enough to read Stephen King.  He had written a book for his own children and this was my chance to read what my mom was reading.  We ordered The Eyes of the Dragon.

            June 9, 1989.  It was two months shy of my twelfth birthday.  I awoke to the sounds of my mother getting ready to run errands.  I asked if I could go along and she said no.  I had to stay home with my brother and his friend.  It was raining.  On her drive to town, my mom's car hydroplaned into a guardrail. She was not wearing a seatbelt and was ejected from the car.  She died instantly.  As word spread around town, people came to look for my brother and me.  We had been at a neighbor's house, unaware of what happened.  As time passed, my dad began to pack up her things.  My cousins and aunts took what they wanted.  My brother kept pictures.  Everything else was thrown out of placed in boxes in the attic.

            When I was bored or lonely, I would spend time in the attic.  I would look through boxes and find whatever long, lost family treasures were inside.  One box was really heavy so I had to drag it out to the center of the floor.  I lifted the cover and saw that is was filled with paperback books.  On the first page of each book, my mother had written her name and the date.  I went through each book, reading her name over and over and forming a stack beside me.  The last book was Stephen King's Pet Sematary.  I picked it up and saw that gold bookmarker underneath.  I put the rest of the books back in the box, took the bookmarker and book to my room, sat on my bed, and began to read.