March 15, 2009

• Childhood
  

  The other day I needed a book. The used bookstore did not have a copy. A brilliant idea occurred to me. The public library. I have a card so I must have been there a couple of times. Some people are regulars at the library. Not I. Public libraries make me uncomfortable. They're quiet and they remind me of school, which were unpleasant years for me. Maybe it's because I wasn't smart enough to get along well in an academic environment. One reason I didn't like school was because I didn't read well. Certainly not to my level, which was assigned to me according to my age and grade. I didn't read as well as the other children in my class. No, not even as well as the children in the class behind me. My comprehension was good but it took me forever to read something. For one reason or another this made me a reading outcast by third grade. I had a reading tutor that summer. After that bumpy start libraries and I never really hit it off. That was where people who read well went. They liked reading. I felt that even if I liked it I still didn't do it well so I avoided it.

  What book did I get at the library you ask? Oh see? Not only am I a slow reader, but one who digresses as well. Tsk, tsk and tut, tut. Peter Pan! It was in the juvenile section at the library. As a juvenile I never read it, but you've probably surmised that already. The things I remember reading as a child were not children's books. Somehow I got into reading the books my mother read and she read some strange ones. Titles like, Truth Stranger Than Fiction and Edgar Cayce, The Sleeping Prophet. Seems there are a number of Truth, Stranger Than Fiction books today. None of them are the strange true stories of super human feats and paranormal activities of mind over matter and the like I read as a child. Those books made Dick, Jane and Spot seem dull by comparison. I might have enjoyed Peter Pan as a child but Mary Martin flying around in tights on television each year made me think I knew the story. Why bother? If you saw the special on TV or watched the Disney movie you already knew all about it. Reading was always work in school so the idea of doing it for pleasure never occurred to me. Why Peter Pan? You might wonder. I needed some of the text to use as an example for a talk I'll give in the morning. A strange thing happened while searching for the text. I had to read some of the book. It was so much fun to read and see the story I thought I knew unfold in rich detail that I read the whole book.

  Never having read Winnie the Pooh, Peter Pan, The Little Prince and other children's books when I was a child left me to find them and read them later in life. It's fine with me. J.M. Barrie copyrighted Peter Pan in 1911. The children then must have been better readers than today's youth because some of the words he used I had to look up in the dictionary. Perhaps it's not a children's book at all. Maybe it was written for adults who never had a childhood, like I. Never having had children I never read children's books to them so I had to find them on my own, rummaging around in used bookstores or hearing about them from someone who did have a childhood. So here I am, soon to be sixty-two, finding that I have the time and heart to have a childhood. It takes an uncomplicated heart to see the truth of life. Unfortunately it doesn't take long to complicate a heart and drive the childhood right out of it. If our childhood was driven out of us rather than allowed to slip away, we must work much of our adult life to unravel the mysteries of the heart, discarding the things that are of no use. Sadly that amounts to almost everything acquired during our lives. The cheery bit in all this is that earning childhood is much more rewarding than the one given us. The later childhood is prized while the first isn't usually appreciated until it's gone. There's a difference between being childish and childlike. I prefer the latter and am glad to have it.
  

  • 12:07 am
  • 21 Comments