“The Book Hog” and Cory Lux

Last night, Sloan and I got a little more than usual out of our nightly reading routine. We picked up our first book of the evening, a seemingly normal story titled “The Book Hog” by Greg Pizzoli.

We read “The Book Hog” last night. When we opened the book something caught our eye.

We opened to the inside cover and noticed something…

We noticed a sticker inside the book.

There was a Spokane County Library District sticker placed inside the book. Out of the hundreds of library books we have read together, we had never seen a sticker like it before. We zeroed in on what it said…

The sticker read “In memory of employee Cory Lux.”

In memory of employee Cory Lux. I read it aloud to Sloan and asked her what she thought it meant. Being the intelligent little girl that she is, it didn’t take her long to say, “I think he might have died.” Sidney, who was sitting right next to us, Googled Cory. In a couple seconds she had his obituary. Before we got to “The Book Hog,” we were going to do some different reading.

We learned that Cory was born in 1973 and died in 2009. I pointed out to Sloan that he was just a little older than me when he passed away. He was born in Montana and moved to Spokane a few years later. Things started to get interesting from there. He attended Farwell Elementary, the same grade school that I did. We were also both Mead High School Panthers. While at Mead, Cory was a sought after manager for the athletics teams, delivering not just water and towels but inspiration as well.

I know the photo is a little blurry but this was Cory Lux. We felt fortunate to learn about his impactful life last night.

He attended Spokane Falls Community College and, according to his obituary, received a standing ovation at his commencement ceremony when he was presented with his Associate’s Degree in Library Science. From there he started his career with the Spokane County Library District, making a positive impact on the customers and his co-workers until his death after a second battle with Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome.

As I read the inspirational obituary I could tell Cory faced many challenges in his life. Learning about his special character coupled with the loss that we are currently dealing with made me tear up a bit as I finished the last couple paragraphs.

When we concluded the obituary I read her “The Book Hog.” It wasn’t a long book but by the time I had finished reading it she was asleep on my shoulder. That little girl sure has learned a lot about life over the past 10 days.

Tonight I am thinking about the Lux family and praying for Cory. I am glad that Sloan, Sid, and I got to learn about his life. Don’t Blink.

Before I Had My Blog

I just finished work for the night as the Lady Griz soundly defeated Idaho State 67-48 in Dahlberg Arena to cap off a 14 hour day. As I am a little fatigued I don’t feel like putting the energy into writing a regular post. Instead I much rather take the much less demanding route and provide all of you a true Throwback Thursday to my first ever “published” piece of writing.

The year was 1998 and I was a fourth grader at Farwell Elementary in Spokane, Washington. My class of exceptional writers (sarcasm) put together a compilation of our best work into an 8.5 by 11 inch spiral-bound booklet. We called our masterpiece “It’s Funny, It’s Tall Taley, It’s Animally and Cook Bookie”. We then sold copies as a class fundraiser for $5 each. My contribution fell under the “Animally” part of the book.

 

Would you pay $5 for this?

Would you pay $5 for this?

 

For your reading pleasure, here is a photo of my entry with the text typed out underneath it:

Not my best work ever.

Not my best work ever.

MONKEYING AROUND
By Brent

Hi, I’m Brent and I’m going to tell you about a trip to the zoo I will never forget.

One hot summer day I was walking by the monkey cage when I saw a grizzly bear in the monkey cage. I quickly opened the cage and took the monkeys out. There were only three. Their names were Jake, Alex, and Peanut. I quickly scared the bear away, But then something horrible happened. The cage was locked shut. I would have to find the zoo keeper, but I couldn’t find him. Right away the monkeys were trouble. Alex started teasing the elephant, and Peanut took cotton candy from the tourists, and Jake squirted people with the hose. But then something good actually happened. The zoo keeper came by. I tried to stop him but he got away. But luckily the zoo keeper had bananas in his hands. The monkeys went over to the zoo keeper. Now those troublesome monkeys are all locked up. The end.

Just five quick thoughts:

1. Even by fourth grade standards, my writing was awful.
2. Obviously I always knew I would one day become a Griz as I couldn’t help but feature one in “Monkeying Around”.
3. Don’t you love my repetition?….One hot summer day I was walking by the monkey cage when I saw a grizzly bear in the monkey cage.
4. Why couldn’t I stop the zoo keeper? Was he sprinting? Maybe deaf? Did I really even try to stop him in the first place?
5. While my writing improved, my drawing skills never did. If you gave me a piece of paper and a pencil I would be lucky to come up with something better than that sunglass-wearing monkey.

I apologize to anyone who got swindled out of $5 to buy our fourth grade disaster. Don’t Blink.

The Need to Read

In the latter half of my elementary school days, I had a teacher who took a vastly different approach toward the spelling portion of the curriculum. Instead of opting to just feed us with a standardized weekly list of words to study and memorize by the end of the week for testing, he decided to tie in spelling with the other disciplines.

My teacher would basically have us prepare our own spelling list via the required reading we did every single day. Each day in class and then again at home that night, we had to silently read. It was our job to choose a book that challenged us and made us better readers. One way that we knew a book was challenging centered on if we were not familiar with every single word. This condition for helping us choose silent reading books became the crux for our spelling program. You see, for every single word we came across in our reading that we did not know, we had to jot it down in our spelling notebook. At the end of our reading session we revisited the word, looked it up in the dictionary, wrote the definition down, wrote the sentence it was used in the book down, and then came up with our own unique sentence for the word. Every couple weeks we would transfer all of our new spelling words onto flash cards and we would turn in our spelling notebooks to the teacher. After a few days of studying, he would then give us all individual spelling tests on a sample of the words we turned in.

Of course there was a third component of this process: writing. Even though it was elementary school, I don’t know if I ever wrote more than in that class. Each week we had a writing assignment due and built into the grading rubric for each paper was how we incorporated past spelling words into our writing. It quite nicely tied together the two other disciplines that had already utilized the new words. Reading gave us the first glimpse of the words, spelling helped place them in our vocabulary, and writing enabled us to actually use them.

As I grew older, I had more than one voice tell me that our writing potential directly corresponds with our reading potential. This is one of the few statements in this world that I can agree 100% with. The best writers are those that spend hours each day reading. Book after book after book after book. A few newspapers each day. Several magazine subscriptions each week. Numerous online articles. The premium writers in society read billions and billions of words penned by other people to help influence their own few written words. Yes, as I learned early the vocabulary we use in our writing is shaped by our reading but much more comes out of this relationship besides a strong lexicon. Important writing concepts such as style, technique, and voice all become built through our reading experience. Ask any superstar writer from Stephen King to Dave Barry to J.K. Rowling what they prefer to do when they are not writing and I guarantee you they will say reading.

—————-

I bring this point up today because I want to recommit to reading more. I have always considered myself an avid reader. However, over the past year or so, my time devoted to reading has shrunk. I can point to many reasons for this decrease including being too busy, focusing on other things, feeling too tired at night, dating my girlfriend, watching ESPN, blogging, texting, traveling, and wasting way too much time on my iPhone. But you know what? I HATE excuses. And even if I could settle for accepting one of the items I just listed I would be cutting myself way too short for this one major reason…

My writing is suffering.

It kills me to say this because in no way is this a good strategy to get you to continue to read my blog but I do feel like I owe you my honesty. Although I say my reading habits have declined over the past year, I can’t necessarily say my writing skills have directly gone downhill in that time span. Rather, I think I have gradually become aware of it over the last several months. I think it took a while for my dismissal of healthy reading habits to catch up to my writing but it has now happened. Shorter posts, run on sentences, less originality, too many dead verbs, lazy habits, and just general junk has seemed to creep into my writing on a more consistent basis.

It is time to change. I am going to start reading all the books my mom passes my way. I am once again going to make sure to start reading front to back the magazines I subscribe to. I am going to read more of the newspaper in the morning before work and listen to less of talk radio. I am going to make every best effort to read every piece of material that someone gives me.

Time to clean up my writing and start reading more. Not only will my readers enjoy the smoothness and freshness of my writing, but I will also have better topics to write about as what I read always generates some of my most interesting posts. Thanks for putting up with me through my writing slump. You can always send me your book suggestions! Don’t Blink.