The Book that Changed your life was the topic of the podcast-ed episode of the This American Life that I listened to this morning at the gym. There was an act about a gal whose life was infected by reading playwright Moss Hart's biography, a gentleman that became a book collector all because of Lewis and Clark, an easy for me to relate to tale of how influential the Little House on the Prairie series was to another gal who shares my name and David Sedaris made me laugh out loud, as always, with his story of a dirty book he found as a young boy and how it changed the way he viewed his mother. This episode really got me thinking, "is there just one book that has changed my life?"
I think the answer is no. I think there are many books that have definitively changed the course of my life though. I was thinking specifically today about the book I was reading when I met Sam as she has grown to be one of my closest confidants and brings me joy everyday.
I had gone to my favorite used book store in Boise, Rainbow Books, and scored a copy of The Color Purple. I had no real idea of what I was about to read, I had never seen the movie, had no real concept of the plot, but a close friend told me I just had to read it. My parents had just bought a house that was 110 years old and I was living in one of the upstairs bedrooms. It was summer, and summer in Idaho is damn hot, the house being 110 years old it had no central air, I was not old enough to go to the bar just yet, and every coffee shop I liked to hang out in would of proved problematic for me as there was bound to be someone I knew there and would inevitability be interrupted. So I climed up the stairs, switched on the fan and started a wonderful journey.
I did not come out of my room until later that evening when I finished the book, finished crying and felt that I said a proper good-bye to one of my all time favorite literary characters, Celie. There was a pregnant cat at the top of the stairs, which was really weird as my folks had never had a cat and were very vocal about never wanting one. She glanced at me for only a moment and went back to cooling herself in front of the fan in the hall, The cat was living with my sister but she had a pretty unstable living situation at that time and so Sam came to live with us. She had her kittens a few weeks later and I so badly wanted to keep one in particualar. It had a perfect heart shaped fur patch on her shoulders and I was heartbroken when I could not keep her. She and the rest of her litter mates ended up living going to live on my Aunt's farm and I think they all had good lives.
My sister came and went, but Sam stayed with my folks until 6 years ago when they got a puppy. Sam was a nervous wreck around that dog, she would hide under the bed for days, until she actually made herself sick with a bladder infection because she would not get close to that dog. Sam came to live with me in my little house that sat behind Nino's after that. I found her under the bed, took her to vet and got her feeling better. I had another cat living with me at the time and it took almost a year for Sam and I to really bond. The other cat sadly died and Sam was a great source of comfort for me.
No one in my family really knows how old Sam is. She came to us in the summer of 1994 and we think she must of been between 9 months and a year since she was pregnant. That would make her about 16. She is sitting across from now, and I would never guess by looking at her that she was a day over 5.
I suppose this story is a bit convoluted, but is about Sam and how I love her and I love books. Both of them have undeniably changed the course of my life.
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