It all started with a birdbath

My beautiful blue
birdbath

I fell in love with my birdbath the minute I saw it. It's rich blue color. It's lovely shape. I simply had to buy it, bring it home, and proudly display it in my garden. Over the years it has provided birds, insects, and squirrels with a much needed drink. I've only ever seen Robins bathe in it. Does my experience with a owning a birdbath make my reading of Jincy Willett's novel, Amy Falls Down more perceptive? The novel opens with Willett's character, Amy Gallup, falling in her garden and striking her head on a birdbath. The resulting head injury is but the first step on an interesting journey.

It got me thinking about how our personal experiences bring a nuance to our reading. Every reader will have a different viewpoint that they bring to the novel which the author is unaware of when he or she was writing. The author was living her own experience during the act of creation. When you stop to think about it, one novel can have a million different interpretations because no two readers are alike. Mind blowing. For example I started to wonder if you have no experience with owning a birdbath could you truly begin to understand or appreciate what it would mean to slip, fall and crack your head on the side of one? Does that even matter? Don't readers need to stretch their imaginations in order to read in the first place? Would the story have worked if she'd hit her head on a garden seat or even a patio brick? Did it need to happen outdoors? Would falling down and hitting the edge of a sink or the tub work just as well? Or am I just over thinking this? Perhaps I should just relax and enjoy the story. Which I can honestly say I did.

Now my teenagers talk about making references in conversation all of the time, things they have seen on TV or the Web that others their age have also experienced. While reading Willett's book there were several things that she mentioned that struck chords with some of my memories and I began to wonder if other readers would recognize these references. She mentions Amy's obscure books on disasters which included the Hartford Circus Fire. Now I grew up well after this event but just outside of Hartford, CT where the story still carried some fascination. My experience with this story comes from a documentary film that had been produced about this horrific event and the focus on a six-year old little girl who was never identified. If you are of an age (mid-40s) maybe you remember the film projector and its clickity-clacking noise softly in the background as the story on the screen unfolded. The movie scared me. Years later as an adult a Hartford Courant story about how new forensic techniques could help identify the unclaimed bodies, led me to explain to my parents about the bizarre movie and how it had unsettled me as a child. We even went to see the Ringling Bros. Circus for a school field trip in the Hartford Civic Center once it had been repaired after the roof collapsed in 1978.  It was just this brief comment in the book, but my mind rapidly opened up and relived those memories. A thousand other people could read the same sentence and it might mean absolutely nothing to them. See what I mean about how personal experiences shape our reading.