While Reading


While reading, I have been –
-- A cowboy (and an Indian) with Zane Grey and Louis L'Amour
-- A Confederate soldier with Joseph Pennell and Philip Lee Williams
-- A pirate with Robert Louis Stevenson
-- An orphan with Charles Dickens
--A dust-bowl traveler with John Steinbeck

While reading, I have been –
-- A whaler with Herman Melville
-- A gold-dreamer with Erskine Caldwell
-- A small-town barber with Wendell Berry
-- A runaway with Mark Twain
-- An old-time gospel god with James Weldon Johnson

While reading, I have been –
-- A b-flat coronet player with William Price Fox
-- A battler of windmills with Miguel de Cervantes
-- An attendant in the House of Gentle Men with Kathy Hepinstall
-- A basketball player with Pat Conroy, a fire-fighter with Larry Brown, a
defense attorney with John Grisham.

While reading, I have touched the ocean's darkest depths and walked on
planets in solar systems beyond our seeing.

I have climbed mountains lost in clouds, and walked the different road with
Robert Frost and gazed at the little cat feet of fog with Carl Sandburg and
danced to the language-music of Byron Herbert Reece and Dana Wildsmith and
David Bottoms.

I have flown with Lindbergh and John Glenn, stood at Gettysburg with
Lincoln and in Montgomery with Martin Luther King, Jr.

While reading, I was at Dachau on the day of liberation.

While reading, I have sat at the feet of Abraham and Moses and Jesus and
Muhammad and Buddha, and all the other men of God, and also those who would
kill God -- the insane, the madmen, the bigoted, the fanatics.

While reading, I have been boy and man, girl and woman. I have been young
and old. I have died and have been re-born.