Raised on World Book, Bound for Spain
How a Kentucky kid with a French dictionary and a stack of encyclopedias ended up in Valencia.
Growing up, my house didn’t have cable TV. We lived too far out in the country for such a luxury, and on our family’s tight budget, we couldn’t afford one of those giant satellite dishes ubiquitous in the 1980s and ‘90s. Instead, we had a rooftop directional antenna with a remote control that rotated to pick up TV stations up to two hours away, i.e., Bowling Green, Kentucky, Nashville, Tennessee, and Louisville, Kentucky.
We also had shelves filled with books. Most of them weren’t “fun” kid books, though we had those, too. What caught my attention were the World Book Encyclopedias, the Childcraft volumes of myths and legends, and an illustrated medical encyclopedia that detailed everything from childhood illnesses to pregnancy stages (!).
Maybe it’s because we rarely traveled, but those encyclopedias became my favorite escape. I could learn about any country in the world, imagine its sights and smells, and wonder about its people. How would the food taste? If I visited, could we communicate in English, or would I have to learn their language?
My mom never restricted my reading material, and for that, I am grateful. She encouraged my eternal curiosity just by letting me read whatever I chose. In a place where most kids grew up with the same fields, the same stories, and the same future ahead of them, books felt like a way out. There was a whole world out there beyond the county line. Life abroad is proving that world to be very real.
Ordering books from the Scholastic flyers was a highlight of every month in elementary school. Those glossy pages held the keys to new worlds and adventures. My mom usually allowed my sister and me to choose one or two books, and we decided oh, so carefully. In fourth grade, I somehow came to the conclusion that I would learn French, and I used one of my precious orders for a French-English dictionary, determined that I could learn some French this way.
That didn’t work out the way 10-year-old me believed it would. It just so happens that in French — just like in Spanish — you have to know how to pronounce the words to make them make sense.
Still, curiosity about the French and the French language never died. I can’t count the times I flipped to the “France” and “Paris” entries in those World Books, fascinated by that beautiful language and its “fancy” food. For a kid growing up in rural Kentucky, where tobacco farms reigned supreme, it probably seemed like an odd fascination to my mom.
If you asked me which book pointed me in the direction of a life abroad, I don’t think I could point to a single one. Instead, it’s more akin to a trail of breadcrumbs, one crumb at a time, until they culminate in an epiphany. To this day, my favorite stories are those told from the perspective of someone dropped into a strange land, either by choice or chance. Under the Tuscan Sun and Toujours la France! come to mind as favorites.
I suppose the seed of wanting to live abroad was planted early. After all, I did tell my uncle as a teenager, “One day I’m going to live in London.” It sounded impossible then, and — if I’m honest — it still sounds impossible, but here I am, living in Valencia, a million miles away from where I grew up and dreamed of a life beyond farms and small towns. Maybe it wasn’t confidence as much as stubbornness. I refused to believe that where I was born had to define where I belonged or might go.
My childhood was relatively analog until I hit high school, when the Internet, computers, and cell phones began to take over the world. That analog childhood allowed me to embrace my natural curiosity, bookworm tendencies, and love of learning in a way that, perhaps, can no longer be replicated now.
Looking back, that paperback dictionary wasn’t much help in teaching me French. It did crack open the idea that I could learn my way into another world if I was stubborn enough to try. Decades later, I’m still doing the same thing in Valencia — flipping through words, fumbling through conversations, and discovering that the lesson wasn’t language itself but the possibilities it represented.
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