'The Great Writers Are My Teachers'

An old friend asks if I remember reading Homer Price (1943) by Robert McCloskey. The library in Pearl Road Elementary School was a cramped classroom on the second floor. A girl named Beth Ann Daniels and I had a friendly competition to read all of the books in the school’s small collection. The librarian kept a record and Beth Ann won. We both loved Homer Price (I remember where it was shelved), especially the story about the out-of-control doughnut machine. 

Decades ago I wrote a newspaper column about another book from the school library I read repeatedly. All I remembered was the story, not the title or author. I described the plot -- an Indian boy in the upper Great Lakes carves a canoe out of wood, releases it in Lake Superior, and the toy floats to the Atlantic Ocean. I asked readers to identify it. In the next week or so, in those pre-Internet, pre-email days, I received almost 100 letters (paper, ink, envelope, stamp) and numerous calls at the office telling me the book I sought was Paddle-to-the-Sea by Holling C. Holling, published in 1941. I bought a copy and introduced it to my oldest son, though it never captured his imagination as it had mine. Here's a paragraph from that column written almost forty years ago:

 

"Today, the great writers are my teachers. I can’t imagine living my life without the wisdom left by Chekhov, Samuel Johnson, Dickens, Shakespeare, Thoreau and Whitman."

 

We’ve always made sure our sons could get their hands on any books they wanted. That meant frequent trips to libraries and bookstores, and wide-open borrowing privileges from the shelves at home. As a kid I hated being told a book was “beyond your reading level.” I remember my middle son (now a first lieutenant in the Marine Corps), when he was about three years old, repeatedly borrowing a volume from the public library in Saratoga Springs, N.Y.: Eurotunnel, a children’s book about the tunnel beneath the English Channel. After he had to return it, I would take him to the library the following day and he would run to the children’s room in the basement, to the place where Eurotunnel had been reshelved, and clutch it to his chest, almost weeping with relief.

 

Little has changed, except some of my tastes in reading. If we look long enough, and are willing occasionally to ask for help, we find the books we need.