I read to the Mansion residents every Thursday for an hour or so, and I love doing it, and I think they do also. I always draw a full house. The residents love to be read to.

I always try to bring a new book and challenge them, and generally I get books I think they will love. This week, I decided to do something different. In addition to bringing books (every week, Connie Brooks at Battenkill Books and I pick out some new titles) that they like, I decided to bring a book that I love very much and see what happens.

I get reliable responses. If they don’t like a book, they go to sleep. If they like it, they stay awake. I always know how I’m doing.

This time, they all stayed awake.

Today brought my favorite book of all time, Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years Of Solitude. I asked if any of the residents had ever heard of Marquez and/or the book, and none of them had.

I also brought a book they love called The Wonky Donky by Craig Smith, a book I read to them every week and that I know they love.

I wasn’t sure what to expect and Julie the Activities Director (thanks for emptying out the Mansion Amazon Wist List gave me a funny look when I took the book out.

They were all quiet when I read his quite famous opening line, one I know by heart: “Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distance afternoon when his father took him to discover ice. At that time Macondo was a village of twenty adobe houses, built on polished stones, which were white and enormous, like prehistoric eggs.”

From the moment I read this I knew it was the right move.

They were mesmerized by Marquez’s brilliant imagery in the town of Macondo: parrots, gypsies, lizards, corrupt generals, strutting politicians, all kinds of colors, ghosts and devils, downpours and swamps, hustlers and golddiggers.

They peppered me with questions. He must have been “homosexual” to write like that, said one residents, and I wasn’t sure if it was a compliment or not (she said it was.)

They loved the birds and the intrigue and love that so characterized Marquez’s work.

They especially loved the gypsy who called himself Melquiades, a heavy man with an “untamed beard and sparrow hands.”

Meiquiades brought the wonder of magnets to the astonished villagers, two heavy metal ingots from house to house, “everybody was amazed to see pots, pans, tongs, and braziers tumble down from their places and beams creak from the desperation of nails and screws trying to emerge, and even objects that had been lost for a long time appeared out of nowhere…”

Madeline wanted to know if there was a book I could bring a book about Melquidades, she wanted to know more about him. I said there was no book like that, but perhaps he might re-appear in this one (I don’t think he does.)

We had a great time talking about Nobel Laureate Marquez and what a literary giant he was, and how he wrote his books. They all  wanted to know if he was alive, where was he born?  They wanted to know more about Latin America.

I was amazed that this writing touched them like that, and we all agreed I would read some pages from the book every week. Of course it touched him, Marquez was a genius and his imagery and story-telling was so vivid almost anyone would love it.

They had never heard of the Nobel prize either, and I got to tell them about that. I would have thought, shame on me, that this was beyond them, it wasn’t. I reminded myself not to project my own limitations onto them.

Right after that, I read Craig Smith’s The Wonky Donky, a play on words that makes them laugh every time, the more they hear it, the more they love to hear it. I thought what a wonderful thing it was to do a reading that began with Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s most famous novel and ended with the Wonky Donkey.

How strange to be reading one of the great novels of all time and then, a few minutes later, a funny book writing for elementary school children. But it worked, it really did.

Sometime, I see, they love what is familiar, and sometimes, I see, they love what is new and challenging. Marquez writes a lot about love, and I think the residents remember love and still yearn for it in their lives. I think sometimes that no one fully turns themselves over to aging, even when they learn to accept it.

Reading One Hundred Years Of Solitude makes me love the class all the more, I think it’s good for me to bring writing that I love along with writing that they love. It makes the whole hour richer and more connected, it’s an hour about us, not just me or them.