My wonderful granddaughter Albanie will celebrate her eighth birthday later this month.
She’s the youngest of six children, and we have established a tradition in our family. Both of our children grew up loving to read, and we made sure they had plenty of books. Both Pauline and Virgile have continued reading into adulthood and beyond, and Pauline has passed her love of books along to her children.
If there’s one thing true about a life in the Foreign Service, it’s that it’s important to keep your possessions to as few boxes as possible. So amassing shelf upon shelf of books isn’t a good idea. That’s where ebooks come in.
The first ebook readers came out back around 2001, when Sony came out with a couple of models.
I had a Rocket reader, and it was very primitive compared to the two readers that came out less than 10 years later, Amazon’s Kindle and Barnes & Noble’s Nook. All of a sudden, there was something the size of a book that could hold hundreds and even thousands of manuscripts.
So the tradition we created was that Nicole and I would purchase a Kindle for each of our grandchildren when they reached their eighth birthday. The fifth of the six turned 8 three years ago this fall, leaving only little Albanie Kindle-less.
Now her time is here, at least it will be on Halloween. Her mother — my daughter — has been telling me for weeks how excited Albanie is about her “Kindle Birthday.” She lives across an ocean on a continent I have never visited, so I won’t get to be there when she opens it and holds it in her hands for the first time.
But we’re planning to visit later this year, and I will get to see her and my five other wonderful grandchildren, who will range in age from 8 to 17. There are few things in my life that bring me more joy than getting the chance to observe as the six of them set out on their conquests of the world.
And the joy they will get from reading will make it so much better.