At long last...

At long last the day has arrived...the day I have waited for, for the last 7 odd years...it feels exactly like what I had dreamt for myself...a wonderful rush of exuberance, liberation sublime, a lazy summer day and an evening to kill...the day has arrived!la di da!~...glory be to God! la di da!~...I have a whole weekend and a delightful book to read! What's better, that's exactly how the week that follows it and the weekend after, and all the ones beyond it look! :) Oh joy!
It must not seem like a big deal to many. But allow me to describe why this is such a treat for me.

For years in school, I just had to begin the day with a book on my ride to school in the rickety school van. No matter that I had children of all ages eager to start another day chattering around me (and I joined in too), but I had a precious book in hand and a world within to retreat into at will and come back out for a change of scene. You see, it had to be read before the bell was rung for morning prayer. And then would come another book for recess, possibly the same to blot out dull lectures in organic chemistry, read ever more voraciously in the drugged silence that invariably resulted from hearing about the wonderful virtues of the carbon atom. And yet another one for the ride back home, to keep me company through lunch and bury my face into as Grandma's finger waved menacingly at me for the umpteenth time for not paying attention to food. A long story, a thick book, the smallest print it had to be... to recline with over my siesta and wake up to for the early evening and get a quick glimpse at before running for music lessons and run back to for dinner. And then came the minor matter of homework, to be quickly completed and put away, for what better way to fall asleep than over a tale masterfully crafted and cleverly wrapped up?

The end-quarter exam weeks were my favourite because that meant walking back home from school much earlier in the day, the day stretching out endlessly ahead, dear friends to muse with over all and sundry and a stop at my darling old Eshwari Lending Library on the way. A dimly-lit room filled with the smell of books, old and new, crisp and weathered, hardback and paper, hmmm...the feel of paper to skin, accompanied by the promise of a wondrous fantasy is the single most joyful thing ever imaginable. Ever. And a whole room full of it! (I shall have a library of my own one day. At home. With couches to sink into and lamps of wrought iron. A coffee maker in a corner somewhere. A window looking out at squirrels scampering up a tree...) At any rate, having 4 additional hours then meant a 4th book could be easily fit into a day's schedule. Perfect.

But then, sadly, school ended, and college began. (Not that I didn't like college, mind you. I loved it in fact.) And with it went my bus rides and stolen reads in class (the classes were facinating, yet a minor consolation, I assure you). More importantly, my vacant summer days of unquestioned freedom and abandon had been irrevovably snatched from me. Or seemingly so at least. It had to be filled with research breakthroughs. (In Biology that means sleeping and waking with the bug, mostly just waking.) And so, I promised myself, that one day, not far away, I shall reprise my summer of reading. It is wholly figurative, mind you. Come rain or hail, there will be reading for sure. I shall have merry rides on buses and trains, evenings to spare, weekends to sing and paint and hike about, but with hours to spare for the alphabet.

And so it was that yesterday a chance conversation with a friend while waiting for my bus (yay!) to work set the wheels in motion. He told me about the arrival of the hit Broadway musical, Wicked- The Untold Story of the Witches of Oz, in SFO and that sealed my resolve for the summer of '08. It brought back the irreristible urge to get my hands on a book , in this case, the one the musical is based on. With a singular determination, I headed straight for the bookstore after getting off the train (yay! again) in the evening. To my utter astonishment and great delight I found three copies of it sitting pretty on a shelf, in the fanstasy fiction section (rightly so).

As I flipped through the pages, it struck me that the day I'd promised myself had indeed arrived! I realized that I did have train and bus rides to take into work. I did not have quite the madness of my first two years at work trying to get on board as many projects as one humanly could, while giving standardized tests, training new hires, applying, PT, and ...the list goes on. It dawned on me that this summer is my summer. I have an art class and a web design class to go to, Dhwani to sing sweet melodies with, the perfect weather to go hiking about on, and evenings to myself. All to myself. Free from PT, free from guilt of a nobler cause turned into a series of deadening deadlines, free from panic of missing any (metaphorical) buses. It is just free. Free to read.

And this is how good it gets. Now I have a list of what I shall read and a few in hand already. A couple books to quickly finish tonight (burning the midnight oil is well worth the effort for such a cause) and my new book to begin!

Life is just peachy. Sing Hallelujah to the Lord!

ps: As an aside- It has been a week of Oz! It started Monday listening to Judy Garland reminiscing her days during the shooting of TWW of Oz, and the music of course. Oh! the sweet melody. It reached its highest point yesterday, and it wasn't over with Wicked. The bookstore owner let me in on a sneak preview of a cherished treasure- 100 years of Oz in print, capturing the book, to the film to all kinds of memorabilia photographed and documented...And while I'm at it, I figured I may as well watch TWW of Oz this weekend! Somewhere o'er the rainbow...:) Just peachy, I say.