Reading After All These Years

I am the legal representative of Joanna, a 58-year-old neurodivergent woman named Joanna. In my book Easy Street, I write about how my husband met Joanna 15 years ago on the street in front of KooKooRoo and how I became her legal guardian when her mother, Honey, died.

The story of my friendship with Joanna

Source: Used with permission/Maggie Rowe

Joanna’s life has been shaped by the boundaries others drew around her. The education system took one look at her neurodiversity and basically threw in the towel. Her education ended in the fifth grade, an arbitrary line that defined, for her, the limits of knowledge and possibility. In my book I write, “There was no ceremony, no acknowledgment of what was being left behind—just the closing of a door.”

I have seen Joanna read over the last 15 years. But only contracts, a painstakingly heroic process for Joanna (her mother had always told her “someone needs to read the contract,” and without her mother, that someone was Joanna).

This Christmas, I had a thought—I wonder if Joanna would enjoy reading a book? I knew she hadn’t read for pleasure since she was a child, but maybe, I thought, it wasn’t too late.

I bought her a book: Cloudspotting for Beginners by Gavin Pretor-Pinney, illustrated by William Grill. It is a book about clouds, written with the lightness and wonder of a child’s first discovery of the sky. The illustrations are luminous, the font large and clear, the text dancing easily between scientific fact and poetic observation. It describes the clouds that hover at the edge of our perception: the low-slung Stratus clouds that cling to the Earth, the buoyant Cumulus clouds that seem ready to float away, and the delicate Cirrus clouds that streak across the highest reaches of the atmosphere, like remnants of a dream.

I gave it to Joanna with the nervousness of someone offering an apology, a gesture meant to atone for years of limitation. I did not know if she would open it, let alone read it. I did not know if she would feel insulted or confused. It was, after all, a child’s book—simple and unassuming, an offering of possibility wrapped in pastel colors.

Joanna with her new favorite book

Source: James Vallely/used with permisson

But Joanna did open it. She read it from cover to cover, her eyes tracing the clouds with a reverence that made me feel ashamed. It was the first time I had seen her read for no purpose other than wonder. And I am going to tell you, she loved it. She really loved. She poured over every page.

And then I remembered: Joanna’s father worked on the moon landing. He was one of those men who looked up at the night sky and saw not distance but destination. He had touched the stars, had sent men beyond the clouds that she was now discovering for the first time. I watched her reading, her finger tracing the outlines of Cumulus and Cirrus, and saw the echo of her father’s spirit of inquiry, unbroken, unclouded by the limitations that had been imposed upon her.

Amazing, I thought, I am watching unsullied intellectual curiosity here, curiosity which has remained despite years of neglect and dismissal.

In Buddhism, there is the notion of Buddha Mind—the idea that our true nature is pure, untouched by the chaos and complexity of the world. Just as the sky is always there, vast and clear behind the shifting clouds, our essence remains unaltered, constant and serene. Joanna’s curiosity had never dimmed, never faltered. It was there all along, waiting behind the clouds of low expectations and rigid systems.

She is reading a new book now—about the first moon landing. About the rockets her father helped design, about the clouds they passed through on their way to the stars.

I think of her father, watching from the Earth as his machines broke through the atmosphere, leaving the clouds behind. I think of Joanna, tracing their journey with her finger, her mind expanding beyond the lines others drew for her. And I think of the sky, vast and unchanging, waiting patiently behind the clouds.

It is a kind of grace, I think, to look up and see that the clouds never linger. They pass, they change, and the sky remains.