The weather was fiercely hot today, but I met up with my adult kid and the grandchild. The grandchild was out of school because of the primary election today. He is six years old, a kindergartener, and a fluent reader.

I was an early reader, too; my mother taught me to read when I was five, and it just snowballed after that. I was reading books written for adults by the time I was eight, and I credit my ability to take aptitude tests to my absolutely omnivorous reading habits. But I didn’t read them because they were hard. I read them for pleasure.

My kid wasn’t an early reader – they weren’t developmentally ready to read until half way through first grade – and they didn’t love school, but they did okay for themself later and they have a doctorate in English, mostly because they wanted to get a doctorate in English. It wasn’t a career path.

So of course today after we hung out the splash park downtown for a couple of hours, we made the obligatory visit to the bookstore.

When my kid was young, we treated books like groceries; that is, as necessities. My grandchild is being raised the same way.

When I was teaching English, the affluent parents sent their students to the boys’ school where I taught to get a high-gloss prep-school education, so they had expectations. They wanted their children to read classic literature, and they wanted them to have a challenging experience, so that when the time came their children would get into elite universities. And then those children would be attorneys, finance workers, and doctors, and they would stop reading. Reading was something you did for school, and it should be like medicine, and taste bad.

Why do I say that? Because on Parents Night, I would tell the parents that one of the things most associated with reading in boys (who are often reluctant readers) was whether they saw their fathers read. And without fail, most of the fathers in that room would fold their arms defensively. They didn’t have time to read.

Those parents also pushed their kids to read difficult, challenging books with tough vocabulary on their own time. I swear they were trying to make sure those boys would just think of school as a stupid thing to be survived.

See, I think reading, even reading great literature, should be something you do for pleasure. Something you do because it is interesting in and of itself. Sure, reading is associated with all kinds of achievement, partly because of all the incidental knowledge you pick up in the process and partly because the more you read, the more fluently you read, and so you can keep up with your work as you get through school.

So today, after the grandchild looked over all the LEGO kits in the children’s department at Barnes & Noble and added a few to his wish list (their house is full of assembled LEGO kits), my kid picked out a Dog Man graphic novel for him, and he got down on his knees to read it, and then read it again.

And while I was there, I picked up a couple more graphic novels for him. One is entitled Dante N. Ferno Is Not a Loser, and the other is Bunny vs. Monkey and the Human Invasion. My kid saw my choices, and made a face. “Another Bunny vs. Monkey?” they said. “We had to take the last one away from him for a little while.” See, these books are exactly right for someone six years old, with a six-year-old sense of humor, who is likely to say out loud the things he reads in books, like, “This is my new invention, the Bang-Bang!” and shriek with laughter.

But my kid let me buy the books anyway, which I will put in the room I have for him in my house, so that he can find them there and think he’s getting away with something when he discovers them.

After the bookstore, we went to Target and we got him a water gun. He was just as excited about the water gun as he was about the Dog Man book, but when I got on the bus and left him and his parent behind, I saw him on the bench, reading the book once again.

His dad is going to get him a junior version of Dungeons & Dragons soon.

Sometimes people talk about kids as if they are being prepared for something else, later on, but I think being a child is an accomplishment all in itself, and worth pursuing.

And also, some day he is going to run into a classic piece of literature, chuckle, and say, “Dante N. Ferno, eh?” and dive into something I enjoyed reading myself once.