Everyone around my age seems to have a Twilight Zone episode that sticks with them the most.  For me, it’s the Burgess Meredith-starring "Time Enough At Last," which title I always misremember as World Enough and Time.  (Just my luck I’m about to become even more confused as that’s also the title of the new George Takei-starring Star Trek: New Frontiers episode debuting in two weeks.)  It’s about an obsessive reader who’s delighted he finally has time to pursue his favorite hobby after improbably escaping a bomb that wipes out the rest of the populace, only to have his glasses fall off his face and break, fade to black.

It was one of those episodes for which I refused to suspend disbelief because I kept thinking of all the ways Meredith’s character could remedy his fate.  What was preventing him from looking for new glasses?  If the NYPL building was still standing I’ll bet some optometry places were still around.  And after all, he had to go food-gathering to stay alive, he’d undoubtedly (and likely literally) bump into something.  And bombs tend to fuse things into lenses anyway.  All that aside, I refused to believe he totally couldn’t read without his glasses; my prescription is pretty strong and I’m to the point in life where, if I didn’t have bifocals, I’d have to remove my glasses to read.  And eyesight has been known to improve without the use of glasses, by means of various exercises and–

Well anyway, my point is, I went over all these machinations in my head for years because I could see a lot of myself in that character.  I love to read, always have.  Got it from my mom (hi Mom!); Dad wasn’t big on reading, but she’s always taken to it, as have her sister and brother, from whom I learned to like all sorts of genre stuff from the Happy Hollisters mystery series to fantasy and science fiction to fairy tales to the very occasional non-fiction foray.  Reading actively engages my mind like little else.  Reading has always been the way I found out about life, about myself.  Reading is dreaming using words (and pictures, if you’re talking about comics).

I’m never as happy as when I have time to catch up on my reading.  This week, for instance, I’m on "enforced" vacation — meaning that, because I don’t get to use up my allotted vacation time when I want to (due to my boss requiring me to be at my post whenever he’s in the country), I wind up accumulating too many days to carry over into my next service year and must "use or lose" them before my anniversary (next Monday).  As of the time I wrote this column I had no idea what I was going to do during this week other than read, read, and read some more.

And even then, there’s never time enough.

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