Me, Tolkien and the cherry trees.

I DIDN'T read much as a kid. I had nystagmus-my eyes wobbled uncontrollably, a condition not conducive to following print. As a loner, most of my life was devoted to listening to the radio, back when radio dramas and serials were the mainstay of home entertainment. You know-The Lone Ranger, The Green Hornet, Suspense, Inner Sanctum. Or maybe you don't know. Anyway, I probably listened to twice as much radio as the average brain-dead pre-adolescent today watches television. I'm surprised my thoughts aren't still accompanied by a static crackle.

In summer, I went outdoors, down to the creek with my idolized older brothers to pick blackberries or just watch the water flow. I hated school-every last fearful, vile minute of it. Gradually I evolved to the top of my class and stayed there through high school, simply because I had nothing better to do. With my eye problems and lack of small-muscle control, I couldn't draw, my handwriting looked like pleas from the retarded, and if anybody threw a ball in my direction, my hands flew up like claws in front of my face while the ball hit me square between the eyes. So summer was everything, a beautiful respite, the only time that counted.

Strangely, it wasn't until after college that books became a center of existence. Books and cherry trees. Along the East River Drive in Philadelphia (since renamed Kelly Drive in honor of the dog-dumb, pig-eyed jock brother of Grace Kelly) grew a small grove of cherry trees whose sheet-white blossoms meant spring to me. The season wasn't official until this particular bunch of trees flowered. Then, in summer, I took to climbing into them to read. It wasn't exactly comfortable-cherry trees have odd little knobs on their trunks and branches that stick into your back no matter how you're positioned-but it was just me and nature and culture combined in a very isolationist way. I never climbed when anyone else was along, wouldn't venture up if I could see someone nearby sitting on a bench. Mine, all mine. Leave me alone.

The two summers I remember most clearly must have been right after college, when I wasn't doing much of anything useful-running rats in a psych lab, unpacking books in the college bookstore, one hideous day of trying to sell encyclopedias door to door, all part-time, quitting one job when I had enough to live on for a few months (this was the early 60s, when you could live on next to nothing), picking up another when I was down to 50 bucks or so.

One year it was Tolkien, the next, Greek drama. I remember hitching a monster rubber band around the belt loop of my shorts and hanging The Hobbit from it. Tolkien is great fun to read up in a tree, even with those knobs in your back. Cherry trees may not have the silver leaves of the Mallorn of Lothlorien, but they'll do nicely, thank you. And of all the books I've read, none so perfectly developed and incorporated me into an alternate universe as did Tolkien's, especially The Fellowship of the Ring. The recent movie versions reflected my physical vision of Middle Earth amazingly, but nothing anyone can do will put the real Middle Earth onscreen. The pictures Tolkien drew were internal; they're etched in my head forever. No amount of insipid acting by pop-eyed would-be Hobbits or flat-affected high kings will efface, replace or augment what I experienced in a cherry tree in Fairmount Park. Nor would I want it to.

The next year was ancient Greek drama, the Lattimore/Grene translations of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides. (A friend's damned useless dog later ate my Oresteia.) Here, it was a clash of opposites-between the chiseled, molded Greek forms and the rough, striated bark. But somehow, that only made the experience deeper, more universal. If these Greeks, with their (let's face it) doofusy, fatuous gods, could exert their literary power in this setting, they could grab anyone, anywhere. And grab they did. I read every one of the extant tragedies that summer and was transported, not to an alternate universe this time, but to a way of thinking about literature that still makes me question the legitimacy of everything I read.

What way? Well, that I couldn't really tell you. It's not the famed "Greek unity" of time and place (which even the Greeks didn't follow consistently), but a demand for cohesion, a sense of direction and, I think, a circular wholeness: The end should return to and complete the beginning. I only recently put that together: the Greeks and my peculiar penchant for circularity. I wonder if the connection is really true or an artifact of scraping together an article about reading. Good old truth-it writhes and transforms whenever you try to pin it down, like the shape-shifting fairy queen in the Scottish legend of Tam Lin.

From the days of school hatred, on through nesting like a tree sprite in the park, to the verge of supposed retirement-I'll be officially "old" when my first Social Security check is deposited next week-summer has remained the pivot of my existence. Now my reading's done in a chair on the front porch of our 10-acre-lost-in-the-woods house in the Pennsylvania hills. After every third or fourth paragraph I put the book down, and my gaze wanders up into the mountains across the way. It's a small thing as mountains go, just a hump of undistinguished trees with a couple hunting cabins peeking through. Up at the top, hidden behind the hemlocks, sits a grass airstrip that can accommodate a Cessna at most. Nobody uses it much. There aren't even any legends lying asleep in these mountains, just a history of indiscriminate logging that removed the pines and replaced them, over the next hundred years, with farms that in turn vanished into oak that was later shouldered out by beech.

The black cherry up here produces the finest cabinet hardwood in the world-German craftsmen will use no other-but it does not produce noticeable blooms or cherries. The black cherry is an understated, rather diffident tree. Well, what the hell. In summer, that mountain is my Olympus, or it could be a foothill of Middle Earth. I haven't read either Tolkien or the Greeks in many a year. Might be time to return, this summer, when I'm not constructing a garden shed.