The Book

There was a time when reading bored me to tears. When I was young, my mother would call me over to her and say, “Come sit next to me and I’ll read you a story.” My standard response was either “I want to go out and play,” or “I’m building something with my Legos right now.” As you might imagine, school was twelve arduous years of reprimands, poor test grades, and detentions. Had I not been such a good athlete, I would have never graduated. At least I didn’t graduate at the very bottom of my class; that distinction belonged to Jack. I was next to last.

My four-year hitch in the Air Force was only slightly better. I chose a career path that was based more on the job training than tech school, so it kept the book learning part of my teaching to a minimum. Working around aircraft was fun, but if I ever wanted to have more than three stripes on my sleeve, there would be courses to take and tests to pass, so when my four years were up, I was out.

What I quickly learned after leaving the Air Force was that fate had one sick sense of humor. Jobs were scarce, especially since my only marketable skill was loading pallets onto cargo planes. What I eventually found was a job working on the loading dock at a book publisher. I handled hundreds of books five days a week, but no one insisted I had to read any of them. If people wanted to throw their money away on books, that was fine by me, just as long as I got a paycheck every week.

Every day on the dock was different. Some days more trucks waiting to be loaded than we could handle, while other days, it was graveyard quiet. Today was a quiet one. I sat by one of the open loading dock doors, soaking up the warm spring sunshine, when a beam of light reflected off something resting next to a stack of boxes caught my attention. I tried to ignore it, preferring to remain basking in the sun, but my curiosity won the battle, and I went over to investigate.

Much to my chagrin, what piqued my interest was a book with a shiny cover. What made it even more annoying was the title, I Bet You’re Not Smart Enough to Read This. Imagine a lump of printed paper questioning my intelligence. I picked it up to see who the author was, but it said, by Anonymous. So, not only was this person insulting my intelligence, but they also didn’t have the courage to put their name on it. The longer I stared at the cover, the angrier I became. There are times in life when a person needs to stand up and prove the other person wrong, even if they are anonymous and will never know you’ve accepted their challenge. I took the offending book back to the dock door, sat down in the sunshine, opened the front cover, and started to read.

This book seemed to be written for non-readers like me. The verbiage wasn’t filled with big words and complex sentences that needed to be read multiple times before they could be fully understood. As Joe Friday from the TV show Dragnet would say, “Just give me the facts and nothing but the facts.” The deeper I dove into the book, the harder it was to put it down, eventually finding myself totally consumed within the pages.

I finished the book that night and brought it back to work with me the next morning. One of my fellow dock workers saw me with it and said, “I see you found the book.”

“Yes, why did you read it?”

“We’ve all read it, and it told a different story to each one of us. It will evaporate before the shift is through, but reappear for the next new hire to read. What did it do for you?”

“It showed me that I have a lot of reading to do.”