Free Love at the Speed of Email by Lisa McKay

some money out of the exercise, which my scandalized and
exhausted parents made us return when they figured out what we were up to.
    In Hawaii, I was tempted to start writing my story about
home but didn’t.
    “Your clearest memories of home as a child cannot possibly
be in an airport,” I scolded myself, still staring past my laptop and out to
the white-laced toss and chop of cerulean. “Home is not a topic that deserves
flippancy. Work harder. … What about dwellings and hearths?”
    That year my parents were living in the Philippines. Matthew
was in Sydney. Michelle was in Washington, D.C. The bed I could legitimately
call mine resided in Indiana. I had lived none of these places except D.C. as a
child, and they were such awkward,
lonely years that the thought of going back, even in a story, made me squirm.
We lived in Washington, D.C., for three and a half years before moving to
Zimbabwe, and what I remember most clearly about that time is that I spent much
of it reading.
    I’ve been in love with reading since before I can remember.
Our family photo albums are peppered with photos of me curled up with books –
in huts in Bangladesh, on trains in Europe, in the backseat of our car in
Zimbabwe.
    I can’t remember my parents reading to us before bed,
although they swear they often did – sweet tales about poky puppies and
confused baby birds looking for their mothers.
    “You were insatiable,” Mum said when I asked her about this
once. “No matter how many times I read you a book, you always wanted more.”
    “ Awwww ,” I said, envisioning long
rainy afternoons curled up with my mother while she read to me. “You must have
spent hours reading to me.”
    “I did ,” my mother
said in a tone that let me know she fully expects me to return the favor one
day. “But it was never enough. So I taped myself.”
    “What?” I asked.
    “I got a tape recorder,” she said. “I recorded myself
reading a story – I even put these cute little chimes in there so you’d know
when to turn the page. Then, sometimes, I sat you down with the tapes.”  
    “Nice,” I said in a way that let her know that I didn’t
think this practice would get her nominated for the motherly hall of fame.
    “You loved it,” she said, completely uncowed .
“Plus, I needed a break every now and then. You were exhausting. You never
stopped asking questions. You asked thirty-seven questions once during a
half-hour episode of Lassie. I counted.”
    I can’t remember any of this. My earliest memories of
reading are solitary, sweaty ones. They are of lying on the cool marble floor of
our house in Bangladesh, book in hand, an overhead fan
gently stirring the dense heat while I chipped away at frozen applesauce in a
small plastic container. But it’s when we moved from Bangladesh to the states
when I was nine that my memories of books, just like childhood itself, become
clearer.
    Of all the moves I’ve made in my life, this was one of the
most traumatic. Abruptly encountering the world of the very wealthy after two
years of living cheek by jowl with the world of the very poor, I discovered
that I didn’t fit readily into either world. My fourth grade classmates in
Washington D.C. had no framework for understanding where I had been for the
last two years – what it was like to ride to church in a rickshaw pulled by a
skinny man on a bicycle, to make a game out of pulling three-inch-long
cockroaches out of the sink drain while brushing your teeth at night, or to
gaze from the windows of your school bus at other children picking through the
corner garbage dumps.
    I, in turn, lacked the inclination to rapidly absorb and
adopt the rules of this new world, a world where your grasp on preteen fashion,
pop culture, and boys all mattered terribly. Possibly I could have compensated
for my almost total lack of knowledge in these key areas with lashings of
gregarious charm, but at nine I lacked that, too. I was not what you would call
a sunny child.