Patrick Torres: His Sliding Glass Door Moment and How He's Opening More

My brother read to me every night when we were kids. We shared a small room in our two bedroom apartment. We didn’t have much, but my mom made sure we had books. In the dark, his voice carried me somewhere else entirely. One night, it carried me here: 

"Soon she went further in and found that there was a second row of coats hanging up behind the first one. It was almost completely dark in there and she kept her arms stretched out in front of her so as not to bump her face into the back of the wardrobe. She took a step or two further in—then a step or two further in—expecting each moment to feel the woodwork against-the-tips of her fingers. But she did not feel it."

"A moment later she found that she was rubbing her face against the rough branches of trees and feeling the crunch of hard, dry snow under her feet."

That was my first encounter with The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, and I cherished that time with my big brother. When he read about Lucy opening that wardrobe, I started dreaming about new worlds and new adventures. My brother had a great voice for Mr. Tumnus, and the faun quickly became my favorite character in the book. I was so lucky to have a brother who didn’t mind reading to me. Without a doubt, these story times opened doors that shaped the rest of my life. When you open a book, you open a door.

As my brother read to me, we bonded for life. We would spend hours talking about the books. I asked him questions all the time about what the books meant. We were like two young literary detectives working out each story and analyzing the characters. We became best friends, and as we navigated life with divorced parents and a newly single mom, we had our adventures and solidified our dreams through our books. Because of my brother, I was able to read before starting kindergarten, and I fell in love with stories.

My brother and I both became professional theatre directors as adults. There is a direct line from those nights in our room to our passion for putting stories on a stage. We had experienced the power of stories and dedicated our lives to bringing them to life for our community. Books led me to my passion. And that passion brought me to Book Harvest.

As Book Harvest’s brand new Chief Program Officer, I am dedicated to our dream of a home library for every child. I know firsthand that a home library has a huge impact on a child because I was that child. Research shows that roughly 80 percent of a child’s brain develops in the first three years of life. In some high-poverty communities, there is about one book for every 800 children, and more than half of low-income kids nationally don’t own a single book. I don’t mean they lack a library card or books in their classroom. I mean they don’t have a book that is theirs. Books in the home are one of the strongest predictors of a child’s academic success, stronger in many studies than family income or a parent’s level of education.

And while these numbers motivate me, I am even more excited about the other thing I know: When a child opens a book, she opens a door.

Educators have a name for that kind of door. In 1990, Dr. Rudine Sims Bishop introduced the idea that books can be mirrors, windows, or sliding glass doors. A mirror tells a child she belongs on the page, because the story looks like her own life. A window shows her a life unlike her own and builds her sense of a wider world. A sliding glass door invites her to step all the way through, into an immersive story that lets her truly feel what it’s like to live inside someone else’s experience. A home library needs all of them. The wardrobe my brother read to me about was my sliding glass door.

The doors a child opens can guide her path through this life. She might read Rosie Revere, Engineer and become the next great inventor. Or maybe she will read Drum Dream Girl and be the next great musician. Or maybe she will read The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and use her creativity to build new worlds on stage for the good of her community.

I have always loved the idea that people are stories. We understand our own lives, and each other, through narrative. A child without books is short on the raw material for understanding who she is and where she fits.

Wes Moore, the Governor of Maryland has a fantastic quote we often share at Book Harvest: “Potential is universal. Opportunity is not.” Every child has the same capacity for wonder and curiosity. Some of them just have a harder time finding the door.

As I step into this new role, I am so excited about Book Harvest’s history and possibility. This month, we launched Books for K for every single kindergartner in the Durham Public School System. All 2,300 kiddos will get to choose 10 books of their own to take home. That is 23,000 books, and every one of them is a door. I can’t think of a better reason to be optimistic about the world these young people will one day build for all of us.

If you’d like to help us open more doors, you can run a book drive or volunteer with us: https://www.bookharvest.org/volunteer-with-us. And if giving is more your speed, a donation of any size puts books in a child’s hands: https://www.bookharvest.org/ways-to-give.

What book opened a door for you? I’d love to hear about it in the comments.