I was just reading about parents censoring what their children read. Made me grateful for my parents!

My dad taught me to read long before I hit school age. I remember sitting downstairs in the basement of our New York home learning phonics from my dad.

My mom and dad both read to us every night. They encouraged me to open my mind. I read every book in our house, from the Bible and the Catholic catechism (no, we weren’t Catholic) to The Hobbit, the Encyclopedia and God Invented Sex.

The only time someone tried to censor what I was reading was a librarian when I was about 10 or 11. We had moved to Tennessee at that time. I had picked out a stack of about a dozen books and was checking them out, when the librarian told me I couldn’t have them. She thought I was too young for the books I had chosen and that I had far more than I could read in the time they could be checked out for.

Mom to the rescue! She gave the librarian an earful, letting her know that if she (Mom) didn’t have a problem with my selections, then it was not the librarian’s place to censor me. Mom also laughed at the librarian’s assumption that I could not/would not have the books read and would be preventing other – more suitable – library patrons from checking them out. Mom laughed and told her the truth, she had to bring me to the library weekly just to keep me in reading material.

Thank you, Dad and Mom!