Before they were movies......

Growing up in my house, my dad was a little overbearing. I think it had a lot to do with the responsibility that he was shouldering. The man had nine kids and worked two jobs to help pay for our upbringing. In the evenings, he would come home and the tension would just be thick as soup. But when it came to dinner time (and we ate as a family most always), he liked to read to us. My dad considered himself a scholar and being a member of Mensa, I'd have to say he was pretty smart. He desperately wanted to pass that intelligence along to all of us. He was demanding. So, after finishing his meal, he would settle in and read us chapters of a book at a time. I remember him reading J.R.R. Tolkien's "The Hobbit", and the Lord of the Rings Trilogy. He even did the voices. How he kept all the voices straight from dinner to dinner was amazing. It was one of the neatest regular family events we had. SO long before they were made into movies, my siblings and I knew all about Frodo, Bilbo, Gandolf and all the others. Somehow those moments shared between my father and us got missed in the early teen years between my kids and I.