Grandma: a reading recollection

Dear Annie,

This past Monday was your grandma's 90th birthday, and although she's no longer with us, I've been thinking about her and how much she read to us.  My memories of my father reading out loud have to do with bedtime, but with Mom, the reading was all in the kitchen.

Our father commuted to The City (in those days I believed there was only one), and always came home  on a train that arrived at 7:12 pm -- a time considered too late for our dinner.  So the three of us ate earlier, and Mom, sitting on the other side of the kitchen counter, read to us.  Your mother (my sister) remembers being told that reading was a way to keep us from fighting.  I just thought of it as What Happened at Kids' Dinner.

My most vivid single image from all those years was of Grandma taking off her glasses and wiping away her tears over the death of
Charlotte. That may have been the first time I saw my mother cry.  She read us Stuart Little, too.

She had to find books that would appeal to children across a range of six years.  I was eleven when your mom went off to college, so we're talking about keeping the interest of kids ranging from maybe six to twelve on up to eleven to seventeen.

There was a lot of Thurber.  Ogden Nash: I don't know if it was specifically child-oriented poetry, or just a collection of all his poems.

One of the striking things about the list that Judy, Al and I have put together over the past few days is the large percentage of books written for adults, many of them written from the 1920s to 1940s, often by people affiliated with the New Yorker or the New York literary establishment.

After fifty years, one of the first titles both my siblings remembered was
The Education of H*Y*M*A*N K*A*P*L*A*N by Leo Rosten (under the pseudonym Leonard Q. Ross).  Hyman Kaplan is an eastern European immigrant in what we would now call an ESL class who mangles English syntax and meaning constantly while maintaining his lovely and frustrating personality.  While trying to define vast, used to describe America's deserts, Kaplan says, "Ven I'm buyink a suit clothes, I'm gattink de cawt, de pents, an' de vast!"   "Mom read his accent perfectly," says your mother.

There was a Fireside Collection of American Humor, which gave us Twain's The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County.  Link is to full text, as is this one to one of our other  favorite short stories, The Diamond as Big as the Ritz, by F. Scott Fitzgerald.  The latter is not in the humor category, but a wonderful story of the world's richest family, which lives on top of a mountain-sized diamond in Montana.  I remember loving The Dog Who Wouldn't Be by Farley Mowat: a memoir of his Canadian childhood with a dog of pronounced personality.


archy and mehitabel, which you introduced to my Lizzie, was a favorite in our kitchen. It started as a newspaper column by Don Marquis, who said he found the writing of a cockroach with a human soul in his typewriter every morning. Archy jumped on each typewriter key and couldn't manage the shift for capitals, so it was all lower case. Mehitabel the alley cat was a friend of archy's; she claimed to have been Cleopatra in an earlier life. This site is a great introduction to archy and mehitabel. Here is part of her Song of Mehitabel: imagine Grandma reading it:

i once was an innocent kit

wotthehell wotthehell

with a ribbon my neck to fit

and bells tied onto it

o wotthehell wotthehell

but a maltese cat came by

with a come hither look in his eye

and a song that soared to the sky

and wotthehell wotthehell

and i followed adown the street

the pad of his rhythmical feet

o permit me again to repeat

wotthehell wotthehell

my youth i shall never forget

but there s nothing i really regret

wotthehell wotthehell

there s a dance in the old dame yet

toujours gai toujours gai

So much of what she read us had real style, good writing, and a certain esprit.  My ten year-old self enjoyed archy and mehitabel without understanding a lot of it, but it was a wonderful thing to be immersed in.  There's family lore about Grandma's father (your great-grandfather) holding your infant mother on his lap, reading her the phone book in warm and loving tones.  He undoubtedly read many things beyond phone books (did they exist in the '20s?) with his own daughter when she was little too.  Generations of our family have instilled the love of  reading from a very early age.

We're all grateful to all of them.

Happy Birthday, Mom.

Love,

Deborah

What do we read to our kids? What do we let them discover alone?

Dear Aunt Debbie,

Rachel's question is an interesting one.  I haven't ever sat down and worked out hard and fast rules about this subject, but looking at my own history as a reader, as a child who was read to, and now as a parent reading to my children, I notice a few choices I've made, largely subconsciously.

Some of the first chapter books I wanted to read to Eleanor were series that I remember my parents reading to me: Narnia and Doctor Dolittle, in particular.  My memories of these books, and of the intense, talking through the plot experiences I had with them, are still vivid.  Reading them to Eleanor has been amazing.

So books like these are fond memories, but they're also packed with issues and ideas that can be teased out with the adult reading them; they're books that benefit from conversation and processing.  The discussion of death in the Narnia books, for example, isn't something I'd want my kids going through on their own for the first time.

Even when Eleanor and Isabel learn to read, there will be books at a slightly higher reading level than they can, or will want to, pick up on their own.  Some of these are classics -- a little harder to get into, at times.  If it weren't for Grandpa, your father, reading me Mistress Masham's Repose, or Treasure Island, Kidnapped, and David Balfour, I don't know that I would ever have picked them up.  His reading aloud of these adventure stories brought them to life for me, and strengthened the connection between us.

Some books are just better, and funnier, when read aloud.  As you've written, we've read a lot of James Thurber aloud in our family over the years, and especially when shared communally, he makes me laugh so hard I cry.  When Grandpa was losing his memory towards the end of his life, I'd read him Thurber stories.  Even when he couldn't remember the plot of the story from the beginning to the end, he appreciated the construction of every individual sentence -- the language is so so good aloud.  Years before that, I read aloud Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn to Grandpa and Grandma, the summer I was 13 years old and she was dying of cancer.  It was one of my favorite things about that summer.  Twain lifted us all out of ourselves.

Many of the books I remember reading most voraciously on my own are those I've written about in our long discussion of good chick-lit (here, and here, and here, among other places).  Books with a little more romance or even sex in them than might be really comfortable to read with your parents, books packed with dialogue, quick good reads that don't necessarily shine as literary paragons.  I remember going through an entire series of Noelle Streatfeild's Shoe Books (Ballet Shoes is the first).  Though I loved them, I'm pretty sure that they wouldn't have worked the same way as read-alouds -- on my own, I could whiz through them and not worry about similar storylines boring anybody.

I guess I'm ultimately not too worried about forcing my loves on Eleanor and Isabel, or spoiling their reading experience of anything in particular.  There are always things I'll want to share with them, and there will be things I adored that they'll reject; there will be things they find to read on their own that I won't love as much as they do, and things I will.  There will never be a lack, thank goodness, of books.

Love, Annie