March 10, 2013 Back-to-Middle-earth Challenge: personal memories
B2MeM Challenge: Wildcard (Athelas)
Format: Non-Fiction
Genre: personal essay
Rating: Gen
Characters: me and the books
Summary: How LotR changed my life

"It all depends on what you want," put in Merry. "You can trust us to stick to you through thick and thin – to the bitter end. And you can trust us to keep any secret of yours – closer than you keep it yourself. But you cannot trust us to let you face trouble alone, and go off without a word. We are your friends, Frodo. Anyway, there it is. We know most of what Gandalf has told you. We know a good deal about the Ring. We are horribly afraid – but we are going with you, or following you like hounds."

I was 15. I was the classic nerd--not popular; picked on by some of the "cool" kids; a few friends, my closest ones younger than I was, but none of them really close in the BFF sense of the word. Being an Air Force brat, we hadn't lived in one place long enough for me to have a "lifelong" friend, and then when I was 12, my dad was killed in a workplace accident and we moved again. I'd always told myself that it didn't matter, my best friends were books, I was "too smart" for anyone else to appreciate...you know the drill. But I longed for that sort of friendship.

Does anyone remember "Scholastic Book Days"? You'd get a brochure and order books from there and then they were delivered to you in class, usually English class. I don't even recall the book I'd ordered, except that it was too short and I finished it by the time class was half over. The girl next to me had ordered two books and clearly was not as fast a reader as I was. I asked if I could look at the book she wasn't reading yet: The Hobbit. It was on the corner of her desk, and I remember seeing a picture of my heart throb, Peter Tork of The Monkees reading that. So I started it, and she let me take it to finish. I brought it back to her the next morning, having finished it--such a fun story, and I already loved the idea of hobbits!

So, I went straight to the school library where I discovered that they had three books by that author. Two were on the shelves, so I checked them out: The Fellowship of the Ring, and The Two Towers, and I started reading.

It was another fun story about hobbits--a little more grown-up than The Hobbit, but there was Bilbo and Gandalf and the Shire and it was interesting and intriguing, but it wasn't personal.

And then we came to Crickhollow, and "A Conspiracy Unmasked", and I had my first glimpse of that sort of cradle-to-grave true friendship I had always craved and would never know. That epic friendship of the four hobbits, and later the addition of the Fellowship--it struck something in me and transformed my enjoyment from an "interesting story" to a lifelong obsession with The Lord of the Rings.

It transformed my life in other ways I had no way of foreseeing. It was The Lord of the Rings that brought me together with my husband of almost 37 years now. And years later I discovered online fandom and found that I had many friends and friendships to be discovered.

I owe a lot of what my life is now and what I am now to J.R.R. Tolkien. I hope one day I can thank him.