My Summer With Scout Finch

(July 11) -- The summer I met Scout Finch, I'd just moved into the seventh place I would call "home," where I would begin the sixth grade in the fifth of six grade schools I would attend.

That was the summer after Miss Wilson's fifth grade, the summer of my new braces and, even more embarrassing, a first bra on my eleven-year-old breasts. The summer I waved goodbye through the back window of the family station wagon, leaving Chicago for a six-month rental in Los Angeles, where I would find myself in a tiny bedroom at the opposite end of the house from my parents and brothers, an unbearably shy girl without a single friend.

There was a big old climbing tree in the back yard of that rental house, a garden wall beyond which were flowers like I'd never seen, and a van parked up the hillside housing long-haired hippies that left me as fascinated and terrified as Scout was about Boo Radley's house. There was a library, too, just a short ride down the steep hill -- and a much longer ride back -- and it was having a contest. To win, I had only to read the most books.

Nearly every day, I flew downhill on my Schwinn to return one book and check out another, then sat up in the tree with it, or on the garden wall or, after my elderly neighbor invited me, in the garden itself. I chose short books, determined to win that contest, but by August, the librarians were discreetly pointing the freckle-faced, long-haired blond girl that was me toward books like Harper Lee's "To Kill a Mockingbird."

Like Scout, I had an older brother I adored and admired, and often played with, and sometimes fought with -- fights I always lost. I had a father who was a lawyer by training, as admired and respected as Atticus, if not as old. What I lacked was that one friend who, just by being there, changes your life. And so I imagined myself as Scout, I imagined that hippy bus as my own Boo Radley house, and I imagined I had a friend in a funny boy whose character is so perfectly and succinctly delivered in his proud introduction of himself: "'I'm Charles Baker Harris ... I can read.'"

I might have read "To Kill a Mockingbird" again and again that summer except that ... well ... for the contest, it only counted once. It's a book I've reread over the years, though, a book that, I see in retrospect, helped shaped my ideas about so many things: race and gender, fairness, community, empathy toward those who, like Boo Radley, struggle to engage in life.

That summer, though, it was just a terrific story of a girl I could imagine myself being, having adventures I could imagine I might have. And reading it, I imagined that if eight-year-old Jean Louise Finch could tell a story that would become a book, maybe an eleven-year-old named Meg could too.

That was 40 years ago this summer, 10 years after To Kill a Mockingbird was first published. I've read thousands of books since, and still, I haven't read one that evokes the emotional response I feel with every re-read of it -- nor one that makes me want more urgently to be a better friend, and sister, and daughter and parent and citizen.

I would be a different person if this one book had never been published, or put in my hands. So happy 50th birthday, "To Kill a Mockingbird"! And thank you, Scout and Dill and Jem, for being such wonderful friends that lonely summer, and all these past 40 years.

Meg Waite Clayton is the author of the national bestselling novel The Wednesday Sisters and The Language of Light, a finalist for the Bellwether Prize. Read her blog on Red Room.

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