A murder trial when I was 11-years old placed the world at my fingertips.
I was the third of seven children in a middle class Catholic family living an abnormally normal life, when my stay-at-home mother got a reprieve from her hectic housewife duties in 1970. Three weeks of jury duty to deliver a “guilty of murder” verdict gave my mother enough cash for the down payment on a set of white, textured hard-back World Book encyclopedias. The set included twenty white pristine books with green cover titles and a gold imprinted logo.
The summer between my fifth and sixth grade years was life-changing. It’s not that I didn’t frequent the local library, which was exactly 292- skipping steps past Our Lady of Greenwood Catholic School, but I suddenly felt a bit privileged for the first time in my life — yes, my family had an entire set of encyclopedias in our residence. Not only were we an athletic and musical family, we, the keeper of books, were now a learned family.
I am sure my eldest sister Leta “called” the encyclopedias first, but I ignored her, knowing that it was physically impossible to read twenty books at once. Somehow she absconded with the “A” and “B” volumes, using the tired old debate that she was entering high school and she would need the knowledge sooner.
Refusing to be thwarted by my overachieving first-born, future-valedictorian sister, I jumped ahead and started on the “D”volume, setting my summer goal to spend every waking moment finishing the entire set and answering the accompanying set of fill-in-the blank-questions that came in a stapled booklet with each volume.
Tenderly opening to the first page of the “D” volume was exhilarating — the same excitement I felt later in life when scuba diving the 100-foot Great Wall off Little Cayman Island. The same anxious elation I felt rappelling down a Colorado mountain when I was two months pregnant with my second daughter Chloe. The same thrill of stomach butterflies I experienced when rafting the Upper Gauley class-V rapids in West Virginia and even writing a newspaper column in a sleep cabin train in the middle of India — in the same cabin with two male strangers.
The summer of 1970, this 11 year old opened the “D” volume and was introduced to the fourth letter of the alphabet — this Semitic letter Dahleth, which may have been developed from the Egyptian hieroglyph symbol, meaning a door.
This gift of books from my mother was an open door to the world, to people, to learning. Who knew that my door would open from the consequential sentence of a slammed jail cell door?
