学进去

   I never knew anyone who’d grown up in Jackson without being afraid of Mrs. Calloway our librarian. She ran Jackson’s Carnegie Library absolutely by herself. SILENCE in big black letters was on signs hung everywhere. If she thought you were dressed improperly, she sent you straight back home to change your clothes. I was willing；I would do anything to read.

My mother was not afraid of Mrs. Calloway. She wished me to have my own library card to check out books for myself, She took me in to introduce me. “Eudora is nine years old and has my permission to read any book she wants from the shelves, children or adults,” Mother said.

Mrs. Calloway made her own rules about books. You could not take back a book to the library on the same day you'd taken it out；it made no difference to her that you’d read every word in it and needed another to start. You could take out two books at a time and two only. So two by two, I read library books as fast as I could go, rushing them home in the basket of my bicycle. From the minute I reached our house, I started to read. I knew this was extreme happiness, knew it at the time.

My mother shared this feeling of mine. Now, I think of her as reading so much of the time while doing something else. I remember her reading a magazine while taking the part of the Wolf in a game of "Little Red Riding Hood" with my brother's two daughters. She'd just look up at the right time, long enough to answer– in character –"The better to eat you with, my dear," and go back to her place in the magazine article.