Celebrate: Putting a Book in a Reader's Hands

I was going to celebrate something very different today and may still celebrate that other thing later, but in the midst of sitting down to write this post, I looked over at my nineteen-year-old son who was deeply engrossed in the book I had just pulled off the shelf and handed to him five minutes before.  

My son is a reader, so the reading was not necessarily a celebration, but the fact that he was open to reading something that was a departure from his traditional reading and that he dropped everything else to begin reading it is the celebration.

There are many wonderful electronic distractions in this 21st Century life, so it was reaffirming to see that the printed word still holds its own against them. I can just as easily get caught up on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram, along with all the other content out there on the WWW. Having a book placed in my hand (or ardently recommended) is sometimes necessary for me to pull myself out of that electronic universe.

The book that I handed my son is a book by a family friend, written after the loss of his nineteen-year-old son in a climbing accident on Devil's Thumb in Alaska. I thought of the book because I was reading an article in the paper about the lost Malaysian plane. I don't think I can articulate explain why my brain made this connection, but it had something to do with geography, plane flights, and loss.

I am glad that my son is reading this book. I think it will become an important part of his story quilt, the internal fabric of who he is, woven by the threads of the stories that matter.