When I learned what love is…
I’ve grown up my whole life in a sheltered and loving family. I have been raised to believe that when you love someone you are nice, you show affection. I have been raised wrong.
“Holy cow Marissa, you mean you’ve never read it!”
“I’m no connoisseur of books, Logan. I only read what people tell me to read.”
“Yeah, right.”
“I’m serious, my father says, read Lord of the Rings, so I do, and my friends say read Brian Jacques, so I do, get it!?”
“Fine. Read Ender’s Game.”
“’Kay.”
“Marissa, go to sleep, now.”
“But Mom, it’s the summer and the weekend.”
“It’s past two in the morning!”
“I know, Mom. I only have fifty pages left, just let me finish. I’ll be in bed before you know it.”
“Only fifty pages left,” she said as she turned, then mumbling to herself down the stairs. “Girl, bought that book today. She’ll be done with it tonight and then probably never even look at the thing again. Man, she’s crazy, two o’clock. What a nut!”
That was two years before my obsession really took off. The moment I realized that I owned and had read over thirty novels by the author of Ender’s Game, Orson Scott Card, I began down a path of compulsion and insanity. Within three months I went from thirty books to over fifty novels. My obsession skyrocketed. I lost my mind in research, paper writing, and collecting Orson Scott Card information.
Before I reached fifty novels, I bought number forty-nine, Maps in a Mirror: The Short Fiction of Orson Scott Card. I read this collection of short stories with hunger and honest, devout love. I swallowed each and every one of these stories, one by one, in order. I read the section introductions like personal letters from Card to me. I learned to love the way Card told a simple or complicated or stupid or random story. Mostly though, I loved them all. I read the information about all the short stories and tried to get into the mind of the man I was completely absorbed by.
In the very last section and the very last explanation, I saw Card before me speaking to my heart. “Marissa, there is only one short story that is published that is not in this compellation. It’s called Happy Head, Marissa; it is the worst thing that I have ever had published.”
I was shocked that he could think such things of his writing and his stories. Card became a man to me then. I knew in a few days that the only way I would be able to prove my obsession, whether it was the man or the writing, would be to find this story and to determine my opinion of it. I searched for Happy Head on Google and I found where and when it was published; it seemed completely impossible to reach.
“Mrs. McBroom, if I were looking to find a magazine from, oh, about twenty-nine years or so ago, where do you suggest I would look?” I asked the librarian. She took time from what she was doing to help me order a book containing a lot of the stories that were published in that magazine. We didn’t think that the story would be in there. I was downhearted and a little depressed. I wanted so bad to find the story so I could prove my fondness.
A little on the fussy side, I stayed home the following Thursday. I showed my father the story that I was having trouble obtaining. He looked it up on the Internet and quickly he found a website where we could buy it. The magazine was only going to cost ten dollars including shipping. We bought it that very day.
The weeks waiting for it were long and hard. Agony blossomed in my heart, and I desired the magazine more than anything. On a Monday, three weeks after I had ordered it, my own personal copy of Analog: Science Fiction, Science Fact from April 1978, arrived.
I scooped it up into my arms as I rushed out the door to head to work. When my boss left, the assistant manager told me there was nothing to do.
“Do you have a book with you, Marissa?”
“Always.”
“Fine. You can go and get it, but be discreet.” I nodded and headed to the back room. My Analog was waiting. I hungered in the depths of my person for it.
I spoke to myself with vivid and wild movements as I drove home from work that night.
“Well, it wasn’t perfect.”
“Yeah, but I enjoyed it.”
“You can see, though, why Scard, doesn’t think it sis so great.”
“You’re right; the style of writing did not compare to Ender’s Game.”
“Most things don’t.”
“I know that!”
“Wow, I just realized that we now own exactly 50 Orson Scott Card novels!”
“Fifty, no way.”
“Yeah, I can’t believe it either.”
I sighed as I drove my little white Prism across the exit ramp onto Highway 255.
“No really, did you like it?”
“I liked the characters.” I merged into traffic and watched the cars zoom by. “I loved the characters.” Why? “I guess I love how Scard made them. How he developed them.” No! What then? “I liked…loved even the bad guys. Even the worst of the criminals, villains, and antagonists.” Even Graff? Yes, definitely Graff, without him there is no Ender. “I love them because they are Scard’s. I see the light in them and I treat them like physically and emotionally real beings. They exist to me. They are Scard’s characters, but they are more. They are his children.”
The lights of the Jefferson Barracks Bridge roared in my mind. They seemed to speak to me in blinking sequence; Pain, Terror, Sorrow, Fear, Horror, Death, Hurt. Then a new sequence; Help, Hope, Smile, Life, Joy…Love, Love, Love, Love.
We always talk in church about treating each other like brothers and sisters. I always thought I knew what charity was. I learned that night that charity was more than the pure love of Christ. Charity is in the most basic way an understanding inside a person that all men on this earth are children of our Father in Heaven. He loves them. He cares about them. He wants us to love and care about them the same way. He desires that we ignore their wrongs, they idiosyncrasies, and love them for who they are. Love them as children of our Creator.
Orson Scott Card, I love all your characters, your children with the deepest feelings in my heart. I hope to love all men the same way.
