RIP Harper Lee

Even though I was an irritating child, the Coach never seemed particularly irritated with me--so the moments that he clearly WAS irritated with me stand out in my memory with a special clarity.  One of those moments occurred over the Thanksgiving break of my 8th grade year.

Ugh.  Eighth grade.

Anyway, I was in the middle of reading To Kill a Mockingbird when we had to meet up with aunts and uncles and cousins in Pleasant Grove for Thanksgiving dinner, which we held in some sort of recreational hall--maybe even a church?--because my dad had thirteen siblings and I had a boatload of cousins.  No mere home could contain us all.

Well, I didn't want to go.  I wanted to stay home and read because I was love, love, love, McLoving that book so much.  But my parents forced me to go with them.  WHAT IS WRONG WITH PARENTS?  So I took along my book and skulked outside and hid myself and read in the freezing cold away from cousins.

The Coach apparently noticed I was MIA.  So he came looking for me.  And when he found me reading instead of socializing he was peeved, which surprised me.  At the time I wondered if he was mad at me for being a dork.  I was often mad at myself in those days for being a dork.  I'm still not sure why he was so bothered, although now that I'm a LOT older than he was at the time, I suspect it had something to do with tricky family dynamics.  Because families have dynamics.  That are tricky.

Anyway.

I turned on the TV just now and heard the news that Harper Lee passed away.  And the idea occurred to me that I'd like to write a column about how much To Kill a Mockingbird has meant to people.

If you want to tell me, I'm all ears.  And in the interest of full disclosure, I might quote you.