The empty space is as important as the words themselves.
We read this poem by W.S. Merwin, which he wrote after he saw his wife working in the garden and realized that they would spend the rest of their lives together.
"Let me imagine that we will come again when we want to and it will be spring We will be no older than we ever were The worn griefs will have eased like the early cloud through which morning slowly comes to itself"
I asked Patrick what his favorite line was, and he said, "We will be no older than we ever were."
He said it reminded him of a place where time just stops, where time doesn't matter anymore.
And I asked him if he had a place like that, where time lasts forever.
And he said, "My mother." When you read a poem alongside someone else, the poem changes in meaning.
Because it becomes personal to that person, becomes personal to you.
We then read books, we read so many books, we read the memoir of Frederick Douglass, an American slave who taught himself to read and write and who escaped to freedom because of his literacy.
I had grown up thinking of Frederick Douglass as a hero and I thought of this story as one of uplift and hope.