Mocking Bird

I cried when I lost TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD. It was this battered old edition with a yellow cover and my father's name neatly printed in his careful hand on the front page. I have read that book at least 6 times and each time I see a bit of my life in a forgotten paragraph.

Maybe it had something to do with my dad being Atticus and me being Scout. Or perhaps it had something to do with the fact that Boo Radley lived down the road, a horrific Down Syndrome afflicted boy who would insist on lunging at us terrified kids. He wanted to be friendly, we didn’t know any better. Not until the kids from A Block threw stones at Faran. Then he was one of us.

We fought his battles for him. He never understood local politics. B Block and A Block were separated by a rift - a scary boy shaped rift. I wonder if Faran went back to Afghanistan and remembers the rag tag bunch of kids who trailed him, scurrying away the moment he came lumbering towards them. If I were him, I would want to forget us, never mind the bloody battles and the black eyes.

My Dad is Atticus, he still is, he always will be.... my friend says every girl thinks her dad is Atticus. Not every girl reads, so I know he is wrong. My dad is as reasonable as Atticus and never forced me to do a thing, he just explained the consequences, the decision was mine and he respected it.

There are some books that make you cry, and some make you remember and well some are so stupid you wish the publishers had sensibly burn the manuscript before unleashing the monstrosity on an unsuspecting public that judges a book by its cover.

To Kill a Mockingbird is different, it's a biography of every adult on the face of the planet. Every adult who was a kid once and forgot what being a kid is about. The Soviet Books and Harper Lee do have something in common, they hit home. You know what sort of a grown-up you ought to be.