I lost touch with Bill and Anne Osborne many years ago. An online search tells me that Bill died in 2018; Anne is likely still living in Victoria somewhere. (Please forward this blog to her if you are in contact with her.) We shared music, church, and the arts together in the mid-1970s. Bill was a high school English teacher and Anne wrote arts reviews for the Victoria Times Colonist. They kindly took me under their wing (truth be told, I found their daughter attractive) especially as I prepared to leave Victoria for musical studies in London in 1977.
One day they knocked on the door of my childhood home in Victoria’s Oak Bay neighbourhood. They arrived bearing a gift. We sat down in our living room and I opened it up. It was a boxed set of Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings cycle with a bonus book, The Hobbit. At the time I did not read much. I had graduated from high school having never entered or used the school library. As the last of three children well-spaced I lived the life of an only child. I played games with friends at their homes and watched a lot of television. I read the required books for English 11 and English 12, but that was the sum of my literary input at the time.
A few months later, once settled in London, I stored Anne and Bill’s gift on a shelf in my hostel. At some point I took down The Hobbit and started to read, slowly. The print was small but I trudged on. It took me several months to finish it in, I think, February of the next year. But I was hooked; I developed strategies to overcome the small paperback print and launched into the Ring cycle. This is how I entered the world of readers, of literature, a mechanism which introduced me to the world I inhabited more tangibly through the printed word.
My first reads following Tolkien were primarily English classics: Jane Eyre; Far from the Madding Crowd; Cider with Rosie; and two autobiographies: The Moon’s a Balloon (Diven Niven), and A Postillion Struck by Lightening (Dirk Bogarde). I read a lot of light evangelical theology (John Stott primarily) and some marvellous musical biographies, especially Am I Too Loud (Gerald Moore). In later years, well the list is long. I am still a slow reader. My attention span seems increasingly limited. Doomscrolling has taken its unsavory toll. I use Kindle on my tablet, as holding physical books has its particular challenges.
In sum, I am so grateful for the gift of books in my life and my ability to read. It is always a struggle. How I wish I could put a thick hardcover on my lap and lounge in comfort like “normal” people do. While my challenge is legal blindness (20/200 uncorrectable), even those fully blind now can use technology that enables independent access to a world of literature in many forms. Additionally, and beyond physical challenges, I realize the tremendous importance of literacy for everyone. A shout out to PEN Canada and others who support literacy across the globe.
I am so grateful to Bill and Anne who got me started. I now try to do the same for others. Thanks for reading.
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Take Note - Reflections on life, music, politics, retirement and more by Ken Gray 
This is a great ‘story’. I took awhile to read myself and have become a voracious reader with three books at a time depending on the time of day. Some devotional; political science and history and ending the day with some fiction. And I too began with Tolkien. I even read newspapers to keep me from doomscrolling though most papers in our area are more like advert flyers so I also take the weekend Globe and Mail which has real content. And I make it a practice to support literacy programs like PEN and school programmes as literacy does not seem to be a requirement for graduation. My daughter was ‘illiterate’ when she graduated. Now she writes readable government documents. Joy!
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