Lying on the counter beside my book was another with a bright yellow, red, and blue cover with a picture of Wonder Woman in full color on the cover. I paid for Plunder of Souls by D.B. Jackson and started reading while I waited for the other members of the group to show up. But my eyes kept wandering back to the Wonder Woman book.
My mother had tried to teach me to read before I started first grade. She gave up in frustration. My parents were very careful, but still I overheard a conversation that was followed almost at once by lots of tests. My father, who was studding for his master’s degree in education, told me they were to help him with his class work. I was in graduate school myself before I heard the magic word Dyslexia.
That changed when my friend showed me her comic books. We took turns reading the dialog bubbles. Since we were both horse lovers we read westerns. The Lone Ranger and Straight Arrow were my favorites. But we read our share of super heroes as well. I didn’t like Wonder Woman and I was never sure why. As I aged and understood the world better, my view of WW changed, but never for the better. I was never sure if it was the excessive bondage, the clothing, or the fact that I might have believed at one time that women could never be like that. Or maybe it was that she was presented as a super hero but she ended up doing the typing.
On my third time up to look at the cover of the book, I finally saw who the author was. Jill Lapore. I was in line for her first book, The Name of War, before it came out. Using King Philip’s War as her laboratory she looks at the thesis that the one who gets naming rights wins the war. That is why it is King Philip’s War, not Matacom’s War. I bought her second book New York Burning and had my eyes opened to a whole new episode in history, not one I had never heard of, but one I knew little about.
So now I had to own this book, not because it was about Wonder Woman but because of Writer Woman the author.
I am a bit more than half way through. It is shorter than it looks because it is a scholarly work with pages of notes. I find I am a bit uneasy about this story much as I was about the Wonder Woman comics. Again I can’t say why. It isn’t the strange family structure of Dr. Marsden, or the way he seems to have assumed that everyone would take care of him. Or even the fact that he manipulated the truth to get what he wanted.
Perhaps the real problem is not with Wonder Woman, Dr. Marsden or my dyslexia, but with the fact that life isn’t fair and I really wish it were.