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Freedom Reads Library Coordinator David Perez DeHoyos sat down with Hector, Freedom Library Patron at MCI-Norfolk, to talk about all things books. Read their conversation below.

A full moon cast a wintry bright light over London while people from all over the world hurried across cobblestoned streets to the seasonal sound of Christmas. Street-corner Santas held gleaming brass bells which they shook endlessly in the cold night. From high-end boutiques glittering up and down and all around in silver and gold, to the pipe smoking vendor selling bourbon laced eggnog with candy cane mixers, to the church choir singing “We Three Kings” beneath a Victorian-era lamppost, the scene in London was about one thing: Christmas. The holiday was here, large and in charge. It was holding the candle of religion in one hand, while balancing the candle of commercialization in the other. Whether or not you or anyone else was in the mood for Christmas, the sights and sounds of the city in December were doing their level best to get you there.

I’ve learned that some of us, with these two ears of ours, though parallel and balanced, still hear like owls – with a particular precision. Owls have ears that almost function as longitude and latitude. At forty miles per hour and over three feet of freshly fallen snow, an owl can swoop down and locate the heart pulse of a mole twelve inches buried in white. I am humbled by that necessary focus. And though my brain is scattered as some memories might be, my receptors are finely tuned to decipher, and sometimes only this, complicated text into the reasons I am not loved.

A supermoon shining older and colder than superstition cast a wintry light over London while I hurried over cobblestoned streets to the sound of bells ringing in the white-gloved hands of the sidewalk Santa.