Week 12 - Book Intro

As a gangly young teenager I was desperately looking for a way to reconnect with my stepfather.  He had been around since I was five and things were just like a "normal family" until I had gotten to about twelve.  Inexplicably, he and I never talked any more.  Our conversations became one sided where he interjected a monosyllable every once in a while before abruptly ending by telling me to go do "something."  I had no way of knowing, with my preteen experience, that it had almost nothing to do with me.  Looking back now, I understand the undercurrents of my parents' lives at that time and see more clearly that there was nothing that I could have said or done to make any significant change in my stepfather's grumpy disposition.  I never saw the drunken episodes or heard the arguments about his drinking between him and my mother, those were stories that I heard much later in life.  Long after the denial of being an alcoholic, the quitting cold turkey, the many falls off of the wagon, and finally the divorce in my early twenties - that was when my mother and I talked about those times.  But back then I was sure that it must be about me, and since it was I could, and must, fix it.

Since I was a young teenage girl, and my father a guy's kinda guy, there was little mutual ground for me to work with.  Still I gave it a shot.  That summer was interesting in many ways for me, since I learned a lot of new things from him even if it was with faked interest from the start.  That was the year that I learned to shoot a rifle, when I kept asking him about the one that we kept in the barn in case of raccoons or big rats.  He took me out and showed me how to shoot a few evenings a week for a month or so.  We shot some of the empty beer cans, ironically that he provided, off of the mound of dirt past the garden.  I learned how to change a bike tire tube, how to tell the difference between English and metric wrenches, and how to work a wood splitter.  All of these activities were rather short lived.  I assumed that I had not put in proper effort, and kept casting about for another avenue to reconnect.

He was never much of a reader, not for fun anyway, but I was.  I loved reading just about anything.  I actually had a secret goal of reading every non-fiction book in our little elementary school library before finishing eighth grade (I made it to the W's).  I had noticed on a little shelf in our living room that there were a couple of old, faded paperback books.  I had asked my mom and she had said that they weren't hers, so they must have been his.  I thought how perfect it would be if I read them and then I could talk to him about the books.   The covers were rather odd, an old Star Wars kinda look to them, and they were obviously old and well-read.  The title didn't give me any hint or clue as to what I was delving into, just a single word "Dune" with the smaller letters "Frank Herbert" underneath the silhouette of a man walking in a desert.  I knew my stepfathers liking for the science fiction stories - we watched Dr. Who on PBS and sat and watched Star Trek (the originals with Scotty and Kirk) every night - so I knew that this must be along the same lines.

Delving into the work of Arrakis, known as "Dune" to the natives was an amazing experience for me.  Not only was this a new and amazing adventure, but it was the first time that I found that grown-up books could be as interesting and attention-grabbing to me as the young adult versions.  It seemed easy to forget everything that I know and allow the author to paint a new universe, where monstrous animals lived, space travel was as common as cruise ships, and magic lived and breathed within societies.  The voyage of the teen prince to a new world was easy to follow, and lent itself nicely to my own tribulations.  While I was unable to use "Dune" as a vehicle to bridge the widening gap between myself and my stepfather, I was able to follow along with young Prince Leto through many stages of his life.  Through the reading several books in the series, I imagined my stepfather reading them at my own age, and I at least felt that while we were on different pages now, once we had both been in the same place, riding along on a highliner to a new unknown world.