Unusual Perusal

“Nobody reads a phone book for fun! That’s just strange!”

From my work station in the center front of the pharmacy, I’m always at least partly aware of what’s going on at the ‘drop off’ and ‘pick up’ windows. Busy as I was processing prescriptions, I had noticed the young mother, a newbie to our establishment, being waited on by my technician. “Another round of antibiotics for another kid...” I said to myself.

The bit about the phone book, however, grabbed my attention. I figured the lady must be talking to one of her kids, and I couldn’t resist the urge to take a look at the little phone book reader. By the time I sidled over to ‘drop off,’ the subject had turned to a slightly different topic.

“...and no one just reads an encyclopedia like that either.” the dark haired young woman said disapprovingly, looking down at a young lad who couldn’t have been more than 10 years old.

“But it’s so interesting!” exclaimed the boy, who, being of petite build and wearing wire-rimmed glasses, looked like a young Harry Potter, “There’s such interesting stuff in an encyclopedia!” The young lad spoke with utmost earnest enthusiasm, as if he couldn’t believe his mother would not embrace such a fulfilling activity.

As the young mother, holding a sickly looking baby, continued to berate her ostensibly eccentric young son while waiting for my tech to enter insurance information into the computer, I couldn’t suppress a surge of support that I felt for the boy-who-dared-to-be-different, this kid who had the audacity to eschew virtual entertainment for more erudite past-times.

The sad thing was that the mother really did seem to be disappointed in her son for engaging in such unusual perusal. “That’s not ‘normal,’ son, and you must- at all costs- strive to be normal!” was the message, the message that just twisted my heart and made me want to shout “No! Don’t you see what you have here? For God’s sake, encourage it- don’t squelch it!”

Which I couldn’t do, of course.

“That sounds just like my daughter,” I said cheerfully, “She reads the encyclopedia, too. She’s got one on her lap-top and wouldn’t trade it for all the video games in the world.”

“Well,” conceded the mother with a glance at her wayward son, “I guess there are other people in the world like you.”