I learned how to be a parent from reading A Tree Grows In Brooklyn, by Betty Smith.

The novel prepared me to expect the unexpected.

As a parent, you do not know what day your child will come to you and tell you of an incident that will drive you to violent thoughts that you pray do not become actions.

You don’t know if it will happen when they are young, when they are a teenager, or even when they become an adult themselves.

When your child tells you that something happened to them, your thoughts can go to a crazy extreme. For a moment, when you let your mind go still, you recall how Francie’s parents handled a menace lurking around their neighborhood. They were fearful, but they were honest with their children about it. They told their children what the danger was and then they showed up to protect their kids when the danger arrived. When Francie reveals to her parents that she can still feel where her attacker touched her leg, they don’t tell her “Don’t worry about it. It’s all in your head. Just ignore it, it will go away.” Instead, her dad takes action. He pours acid on a cloth and applies it to her skin.

A scar is formed and, for Francie, it eliminates the visceral feeling of unwanted male flesh touching her. Instead of ignoring his daughter and let her ruminate about the incident in her head for years to come every time she looked at her leg, her dad creates a new memory. A memory of strength, not of fear.

As a parent, you sometimes have the ability to overpower the emotional pain that has been inflicted upon your child and add to it a memory of you helping her. Acid is not required. You can use words to help your children find a way forward. The emotional scar that remains can remind them of the help, not the hurt.

I am a better parent from reading and rereading this book, picking up the book at times in my early adult life when I didn’t want to be a parent yet. I realize now I was absorbing the words and holding them in a safe place, the lessons revealing themselves to me when necessary. Francie did not have the best parents in the world, but when they tried, they were the best parents they could be. And that’s the grace I give myself in the hard moments.

I was drowning and I didn’t mind. Maybe I was ten, maybe I was twelve, but Where the Red Fern Grows had me by the neck and held me under its well of words. I read the book, then I read it again, each time drowning in letters on the page and tears by the time I reached the last of it. I named the first dog, a beagle, I ever bought for myself, Ol’ Dan. He snorted, was fat, he never hunted, but daily he reminded me of that book.

When younger than that, I lived in a neighborhood that had an ice cream truck and a bookmobile. The ice cream truck meandered our streets daily in the summer; it’s bell, heard blocks away, made my sister and me scramble for change, search under couch pillows, and beg our parents for treats. The bookmobile didn’t visit as often, maybe once a week or two, and although my sister was less enthusiastic, I raced around in the same fashion, gathering borrowed books to return so I could pick new ones.

The outside of the van had imaginary landscapes, Seussian characters, Puff the Magic Dragon, and flying carpets emblazoned on its sides. Inside was a dimly lit heaven. Shelves and shelves of bungeed books, a carpet with flattened roads and flattened buildings, green stars meant to be trees, and a small table, two chairs. My mother sat folded in a chair patiently, while my sister and I looked and looked until I finally picked two new books. I wanted to be a bookmobile driver when I grew up so I could borrow books anytime I wanted.

There was the town library, too. My first official signature in script was scrawled across the bottom of my first library card. That card opened worlds for me. In the books I borrowed, I saw myself, I saw the selves I could be, I saw the selves I would never be, but was glad to meet. I shook hands with each hero and each villain alike, taking what I could from them, borrowing (or stealing) wherever I wanted. I was a thief of words.

They danced in my head everywhere I went, and when I didn’t have a book, those words made for playmates that I could spend time with when my friends weren’t available. With them I created my own stories, my own worlds. Those words kept me up at night, visited me in my dreams, made dramatic appearances in my backyard and played house in my room. As a child, I spent much of my time swimming out in the ocean depths of words inside me, floating, drowning, and I didn’t mind.

My parents created a slot canyon lined with blankets in the backseat where, tented by picture books, I camped for the nine-hour drive. Dick, Jane, Sally couldn't leave school grounds, but Sam I Am, Little Bear, and Miss Suzy the squirrel -- the entirety of my personal library -- accompanied me.

Previously, the few times my family had driven upstate, we left New York City after rush hour. Sunset burned outside the windshield. Above the illuminated highway stripes, black undulating humps rose lightless, lifeless.

"Mountains," my father said.

Monsters I heard and cowered.

This trip, we'd rise with the sun, drive all day, and get to Niagara Falls by dinnertime. None of us knew it back then, but we would move cross-state a total of five times in my first six years of school: west, east, south, north, center. Me the new kid, again and again and again.

By the second move I grasped that classmates couldn't be counted on. I formed reliable relationships with books, idolizing heroines who worked their way out of scrapes. The orphan who seeded her imagination across the fields and forests of Prince Edward Island. The freckled girl whose composition notebooks filled with peer reviews made her an outcast. The bored little sister whose route to adventure has since become an internet cliche.

If I moved between September and June, I'd look for my storyfriends during library period. In summer, my father would walk me to the town library where I'd sign my name to my own card.

The reunion always began with Anne. I'd search the stacks, M for Montgomery, hoping not just for Green Gables and Avonlea but all six Anne books. Then F for Fitzhugh, Harriet the Spy, maybe even The Long Secret and Sport. The last a classic, C for Carroll, Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass.

By the third move I earned adult borrowing privileges. That summer I took The Andromeda Strain on vacation.

"Who's carrying who?" an adult called out, seeing the thick pages propped against my bony knees. "The kid or the book?"

My father joined Book-of-the-Month Club and passed along The Martian Chronicles. I liked S is for Space, but Dandelion Wine shook the welcome mat of small town life. Clinton, NY felt too close to Green Town, Illinois.

Childhood warned me: Don't look back.

I stay present physically but risk time travel through literature, rereading the same 1983 Bantam paperback every two years.

Little, Big by John Crowley is set in a folly house -- a home with multiple facades of varying architectural styles -- where generations of Drinkwaters and Barnables truck with fairies and discover "the further in you go, the bigger it gets." Formerly a rootless child, protagonist Smoky Barnable marries into a house that's both prison and portal.

Similarly, in the slot canyon covid has scoured, I've returned to blankets and books. Hunkered down I'm liberated, joyous inside my head, my imagination the only home I've never, ever left.