Reading Aloud

The other night, my teenage daughter was cuddling with me while I was reading. I got to this: “Hard morning winds were blowing life bolts against the sky each one blue enough to begin a world of its own” and wanted to share it. And then I thought how neat it was that Geryon was a mythical monster being given our contemporary world and the actions of a human boy. That although he was a giant with one body and three heads or maybe three bodies and one set of legs or six feet and six legs, he still kept a lucky penny in his pocket and held his mother’s hand on his first day of school. So I flipped to the section before and read aloud, and continued reading the next section, got to the line I wanted to share, and kept on. PING PING PING PING. As I’m reading to my daughter I’m thinking, What the Hell am I reading to my daughter? But I continue reading because that is the sort of POETIC HERO I am. We got to the end of the section and I said, “I am so sorry I shared that with you.” My daughter said, “I think I’ve been traumatized.” She said it reminded her of the time when she had had a terrible fever many years ago and she was talking in her fevered sleep about a little metal man and after the fever broke I decided to read her a short story about a boy who gets hit by a car and dies which made her cry. I couldn’t figure out what story I had read but then I knew. I said, “That was a Raymond Carver story.” Her class read What We Talk About When We Talk About Love this year and the connection between the past and the present pleased her. Why I read A Small Good Thing to a third grader with a fever, I don’t know. Shhhhh. I’m an excellent mother.