Reading Life 4

So today I was in the kitchen cleaning up, maybe putting away dishes from the washer, something like that. My son, Lukas, called my name two or three times, each time saying I needed to come look see his castle. I imagined he was talking about his having arranged the couch pillows in such a way that he imagined it like a castle. Incidentally, my wife and I are painting the boys' room in a castle theme, so my version of what he might have built wasn't too far-fetched. Anyway, each time I said, Sure, I'll be right there. Let me just get these dishes put away. He'd disappear to his room, and out of the corner of my eye I'd see he'd reappear, but I wasn't paying close attention. He'd say again, Dad, come see my castle. Finally I got done with my task and followed him into the living room where I saw what he was talking about. He'd built for himself a castle of books that he'd carried out in piecemeal bundles and stacked and stacked until he had a column--or a tower, no, better yet, turret, to go along with the flow--as tall as him. I said, Oh, that's cool, buddy, but I was thinking, Oh, no. More work for me. So I said next, Well, you've done a great job of building this castle, but let's get to work on putting the books back on the shelf. They were all picture books, a good chunk of them at the top were Golden Books (on a side note, my wife and I saw what Random House (?) is doing with the spines of the Golden Books now, and we don't like it--I only hope the change has nothing to do with being more ecologically friendly; I'm almost over that because we just can't enjoy a single thing without being criticized, mostly by folks who don't live right either, but that's another rant on another blog--forgive the soap boxish thing there). Get this--he looked up at me from where he sat at the base of his castle and said, Maybe not. I'm going to read them all. I said, Well, that's a lot of books. He pulled the first one off the top, opened it up on his lap, and said, They're all my favorites. We're talking close to 75 books easy, and every time I checked in on him, he was on another book, he'd flip through it, sometimes slowly, other times quickly, but he got through them all. Good for him! Silly me, though: I didn't get a picture.