My grandmother's living room is the kind of room that overwhelms you the second you walk into it. Memories are displayed in frames everywhere, on the walls, on the television set, in the shelves of the bookcases, and on the big old piano. The eclectic collection of furniture, composed without any similarity in looks, shapes, or colors, draws people in, and begs them to look around, to touch something, to lift one of the tiny porcelain women, to try one of the armchairs out, or to press a piano key down. Despite this presence of hundreds of tiny, fragile objects, despite the numerous curious examinations by baby hands and old women's fingers, nothing ever broke in there.

This is the room where I grew up, waiting for my mother to get off of work so we could go home to our apartment. It was never a room meant for a child to play in, it had too many things in there with a "Don't touch that!" attached to it. Either I would crawl up in grandma's yellow velvet armchair, dangling my feet while watching television all day, or I would spend hours exploring the shelves and drawers around the room. When a child can go over a room for years, and yet still find new things hidden under tablecloths and carpets, or stuffed away behind some books, or in the corner of a drawer, one suspects magic is involved.

As I grew older, the exploration limited itself to the bookshelves. The collection of books was not large, nor did it consist of any highly regarded literature. This never bothered me. It was the condition the books were in that fascinated me: the way the pages felt as I turned them, the paper's rough, rich, thick texture, and how the pages had turned yellow many years ago. The majority of the books were over 40 years old, and had rarely (or in some cases, never) been opened and read until I came along. They had been used merely as decoration.

Every day I would run my fingers over the solemn spines of the books and read the small, gold, italic titles printed there. It took me hours to decide on which book to read, but I had all the time in the world. It was important to open the cover very slowly, as the book had been closed for so long. If I was not careful, the spine of the book would let out a loud snap, and break. If that happened, my grandma would see that I had been at the books again, and if she saw that, she would get angry and yell at me. She did not like the idea of a nine-year old girl reading books entitled Captain O'Haras' wife, or other literature bound to contain such inappropriate things as kisses or "bad language". We had a silent war over The Thorn Birds that lasted months. She would hide the book somewhere, I would seek it out, read a few more chapters, get caught, and she would have to hide it again. Eventually I had found the book enough times to finish it. This saddened me, because finding the book hidden behind some shoes in a closet, or behind the stereo was such a thrill. I have never had that much fun reading a book since.

One day I found that there was nothing left to read that I had not read before, not a single, tiny book yet to be found behind the others. That was the day I left the safety of grandma's living room and walked all the way down to the public library. But despite all the wonderful books I have found since, outside of that large, brown, wooden bookshelf, I have never found that feeling of contentment I had, sitting in granny's armchair, turning the yellow pages of a book on the verge of falling in pieces as I was reading.

Even though I am now far from that room, part of me will never leave it. It has become my Utopia, and because it never changes, I will feel secure just knowing it is there for me to return to whenever the outside world gets too complicated.