My Personal Watergate

Yesterday I was listening to word maven Patricia T. O'Connor on the Leonard Lopate Show (she's a regular feature), and she was discussing words that became popularized during the Watergate era, as it is the 40th anniversary of the debacle. The guest host talked about being required by her parents to watch Watergate on TV though she was only a child. She recalled being told, "This is history in the making."

My parents did the same thing. I was only 6 years old but they woke me up to come and watch Nixon resign. I remember lying on the living room floor in front of the television, falling asleep, and my parents prodding me to "Wake up. This is history. You need to see this."

Prior to Nixon's resignation I had a personal experience with Watergate. I was in the first grade. My mother kept us kids busy with activities like practicing the piano daily, and my father, who was an electrical engineer, traveled quite a bit and was often not home. One day when I was practicing the piano, I noticed some audio tapes sitting on the top of it. They were not professionally made tapes, but homemade ones. I asked my mother what they were but she just shooed me away, saying, "They're just tapes." My curiosity was piqued, so I continued to hound her about what kind of tapes they were, and she just told me they were tapes of my father's. Later I would learn that since he was away from the office so often due to his travels, his coworkers had recorded some meetings for him, but at the time of my asking, my mother was just irritated with my questions (she was undoubtedly busy with my other four siblings (at the time she was functionally a single mother of five--eventually she would have eight kids)) and she finally told me to stop asking so many questions about the tapes.

This was intriguing to me; I generally wasn't denied answers to my questions, so I began to be suspicious about those tapes. And suddenly it occurred to me--I had heard on the news that there were some missing tapes called the Watergate tapes, and I knew now where they were. They were on my family's piano. I knew we weren't supposed to have the tapes--everyone in Washington DC was looking for them, and I knew that the president of my country needed those tapes returned. I had to do something.

But what? Clearly my mother didn't want me to know about the tapes. My father shouldn't even have the tapes; I couldn't ask him. I thought about telling my first-grade teacher, Miss Bonsell, but what if that resulted in my parents getting arrested? Our family was in danger (our country was in danger!) and I didn't know what to do. I consulted my sisters, one in the 2nd grade and one in kindergarten. They also didn't know what we should do with the Watergate tapes (actually none of us knew exactly what the tapes were), but my sisters wisely felt that if our parents knew that we knew, they would have to do something.

So we decided to put on a news broadcast for our parents. This was not unsual; we did so many performances for our parents that they had built us a little wooden stage in the basement as our venue. Jennifer was the anchorwoman--she was the oldest, so she was always the anchorwoman. Jamie did the sports and I did the weather (I built weather machines in my dad's workshop until I was nine--all the neighbors used to ask my weather advice, and sometimes they asked me to control the weather, to ensure a good day for a lawn party or something--that always worried me). As the finale to our news broadcast, we interrupted our regular programming for a special bulletin, which my sisters insisted that I do, since I was the one who had found the incriminating tapes.

I remember being a nervous wreck. I wrote and rewrote my copy again and again, looking for the words that would convey the situation without getting us kids in trouble.

"Ladies and gentlemen, breaking news. The missing Watergate tapes have been found. They are on the piano at the home of the Goodfellow family, at 3603 Goshen Road in Newtown Square, Pennsylvania," I announced. My parents laughed. My sisters and I exchanged glances. What did this laughter mean? Soon my parents scuttled us off to bed.

The next morning the tapes were gone from the top of the piano. We never spoke of them again. I suppose the fact that my dad had just returned from a business trip and had the chance to pick them up was the reason, but at the time I was pretty sure that it was because of our news broadcast. Knowing that their kids had known about the tapes convinced my parents to do the right thing. Democracy was safe once again. And my personal Watergate was over.

Reading to Excess

The other day I heard an interview with author Nina Sankovitch on the Leonard Lopate Radio Show. The discussion was about her new book, Tolstoy and the Purple Chair: My Year of Magical Reading, a memoir of the author's year of reading a novel a day as a way of working through her grief over  her sister's death (her sister was in her mid-forties).

During the interview Nina Sankovitch makes the remark that most people cannot fathom reading 365 novels in a single year. I, actually, can. During my heaviest reading period (when I commuted to work by train for nearly 2 hours each way), I read about 500 novels a year. Yes, that's right, 500, not 50. I read at least one a day, usually started the 2nd, and occasionally made it part of the way into a 3rd book of the day.

Even when not reading at such a pace, I have almost always read between 200 and 300 books a year, which is about 4 to 6 a week. Recently, however, I have lost my drive to read. I am down to 2 or 3 books a week, sometimes just 2. This is a scant number for me, a quick reader who would rather curl up with a book than just about anything. Until now. (And if you are wondering how I manage this much, I never watch television, ever, unless a family member asks me to join them. Or unless American Idol is on. It's stunning how much time you have if you don't watch tv.)

I taught myself to read when I was 4 years old. I remember the day. I had asked and asked my mother to teach me all morning, but she was busy. She finally got exasperated and told me to go across the street and ask our neighbor Mrs. Hannenberg, since she had been an elementary school teacher. We kids all called Mrs. Hannenberg "Mrs. Hamburger" (I once heard my mother in her most charming voice tell Mrs. Hannenberg that the children at our house called her "Mrs. Hummingbird," which I think my mother would rather we had called her, and Mrs. Hannenberg, the veteran teacher, replied, "That's odd. Most children call me Mrs. Hamburger." There was no putting one over on Mrs. Hannenberg.)

(And I guess I should mention that my mother used to be an elementary school teacher too. But when I was 4, she had 4 kids under the age of 5. She was a busy woman.)

So I marched across the street and told Mrs. Hannenberg that this was the day I was going to learn to read, and could she help me. She gave me a blue cloth-cover book of the "Meet Dick and Jane" series and sent me home. I sat on the couch with the book and would not get up until I could read. I was in tears, highly frustrated, when my mother told me to go outside and swim with the other kids, but I refused. I was going to learn to read. I had the alphabet under control, so I had a good start. Finally, the sounds came together and made words, and by the end of that afternoon, I had read the whole book. Mrs. Hannenberg told me to keep it. Maybe my parents have it still.

Since that time, I have read like crazy. Except for when I was in grad school and had no time to read anything but texts and academic papers (I didn't go to grad school for anything literary), and when I  had two kids under two years of age and I hardly read except for books on child-raising. And for now, when I am reading only 2 or so books a week (for the past 15 years, I have read a lot of nonfiction and a ton of poetry in addition to the novels I read.)

I don't know why I am not compelled to read these days. The heat? The general busy-ness of my life? The lack of books I really want to read here in Japan (which never stopped me before--having to read anything I could get my hands on here has broadened my scope immensely)?

I don't know why, and I don't know for how long this general reading malaise will last. Anybody ever gone into reading withdrawal? Maybe it's a good thing?