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Friday, 19 February 2010

The Enchantment of Books

By Judy Watten

"I don’t want to read it, I want to have read it."

- Garrison Keillor

My mom tried really hard to transform me from a tomboy running freely in our woods into a genteel young lady. She enrolled me in ballet lessons in 1945 when I was seven. We lived several miles from Midland, Michigan, where the classes were taught.

One good thing about ballet class was someone had to take me there on Saturday mornings. When it was Mom, she also took me to the library which was right next door to the dancing classes in the community center.

I clearly recall my very first library visit. I was astounded; never had I seen so many books in one place. The children’s section covered a whole wall, alphabetized by author. I was so stunned by the sheer numbers of books I was unable to choose one so I just started with the A authors and read through the Z ones.

After I’d devoured the children’s books, I advanced to the other sections.

I discovered the Wizard of Oz books and read them all. I also read all the Raggedy Ann and Raggedy Andy books. For a while I had their dolls too. I read my way through the Laura Ingalls Wilder books starting with Little House on the Prairie, and eventually through all the Mark Tidd books, the Honeybunch books and the Nancy Drew mysteries.

Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Through the Looking Glass, Bambi by Felix Salten and Robin Hood by Howard Pyle became favorites which I read more than once. When I was older, I became a devotee of science fiction.

The following event intensified my love of books.

Our home in the woods in Michigan was located near a dangerous curve on old U.S. 10. We could hear squealing brakes and collisions out there all year. In late fall of 1947 when the roads were icy, we heard an accident around six in the evening. Shortly afterwards there was a knock on the door.

A man, followed by his wife, came in carrying an unconscious baby. Suspecting a concussion, Dad looked in his Merck Manual for advice, then he held the little one gently under the tap and ran cool water over her head, lamenting that the pump was not working well and the water flow was inadequate.

I was crying in my bedroom and afraid to watch, but my little brother Jimmy went to the kitchen and reported back to me every few minutes. When the baby finally came to, Dad took the family in our car to the doctor and home.

That Christmas, Jimmy and I got a present from this family. It was a hard cover book, elegantly illustrated, The Arabian Nights. We had never seen such a book.We were in awe of the illustrations, which were sumptuous Persian paintings accented with metallic gold. The book arrived with a letter saying they could think of no other way to thank us.

In the 1940s, I had a dozen or so little picture books showing Shirley Temple in costumes from her movies. Her golden ringlets were much admired and for a couple of years my hair was forced into similar ringlets, though by second grade my hair color had changed from platinum to brown. I don’t know when mom gave all my books away; they are probably valuable collectors’ items now.

The most wonderful library I ever visited was in 1996, the county archive of Wiltshire, England, which also held old maps, wills and school newsletters as well as county history books.

At that time they had six miles of shelves. They have since moved to a larger building in another town. I wonder how many miles of shelves they have now. The oldest records were on rolls of vellum; they were scanning and digitizing them to protect the ancient material from handling. I was allowed to examine wills from my family from the 1500s and 1600s. The old English writing had to be deciphered for me.

Imagine my surprise when I learned that my dad’s mother had written and published two books. The first, dated 1893, was called The Home of the Dragon, A Tonquinese Idyll. Her brother was a French colonial businessman in Tonkin, now called Vietnam.

She visited her brother and stayed with him for two years, from 1886 to 1888, and later published a little book of essays in English, some fiction and some nonfiction. It’s a tiny book, just seven inches by three-and-three-quarters inches and is meant to fit into a pocket. A few years ago I was thrilled to find it through bookfinder.com in a small shop in Australia for about $6. Though grandmother’s name was Lili d’Abbadie Rebbeck, she called herself Anna Catharina.

When researching Lili’s family history, I learned that English was her third language. Born in France to a French father and a German mother, her father died before she was two. Her mother took her and her older siblings home to Hamburg. But, how did Grandmother learn English well enough to write books in it? I found her teaching French in an English girls’ school in 1881 in Suffolk, England.

I still don’t know how she got such a job at age 18 or whether she learned English there or before she left Germany. I also don’t know when she learned French.

Her second book was The Stragglers, published in 1910. It’s a story of an emigrant family’s adjustment to life in pioneer Canada after leaving the sophistication of Europe. When asked why she didn’t write another book, her answer was because she was too busy raising three children. My dad was the youngest.

There are bookshelves in most rooms of our home. I used to be able to say that I had read every book I own but that is no longer the case. I seem to have become a collector of books on every topic that interests me and am usually reading three or four at once.

As Groucho Marx said, and I’m sure he didn’t mean to exclude women:

”Outside of a dog
A book is a man’s best friend
Inside of a dog
It’s too dark to read anyway.”

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[INVITATION: All elders, 50 and older, are welcome to submit stories for this blog. They can be fiction, non-fiction, poetry, memoir, etc. Instructions for submitting are here.]

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