Day 279: One memory I have, or story of same
Strong memories are interesting. Since I like to write, I have written about a lot of strong memories, whether in high school or college or as an adult, in journals or in blogging. I am going to try to think of something I haven't written about before.
I remember the librarian at my elementary school quite well. Her name was Sherry Gold -- Ms. Gold, obviously, to my eight-year-old self. She was tall (or seemed tall to a eight year old) and thin and had bright red hair. I loved the school library, of course -- my mother was a librarian, I had always seen public libraries, whether in Madison or Evanston, as rich palaces of pleasure and comfort and enjoyment... back in the days before more than three TV stations or any other source of shows and movies (other than a movie theater: no video, no DVD, no computer) public libraries sometimes showed films, say on a weekend, or over a school holiday. In Madison, I remember watching avant garde children's movies about shapes and colors with just music, and also an animation of Ezra Keats' classic "The Snowy Day". In Evanston, I remember going to see the 1930s version of "The Secret Garden". These were rare treats, because otherwise you had to spend money at a theater if you could even get your parents' permission, or else watch the reliable three movies that came on regularly once each year: The Wizard of Oz, The Sound of Music, and Lilies of the Field. Were there others that were practically seasonal, like those? I'm not talking about Late Night Movies, but annually shown, and shared, movies.
ANYWAY, my point is that I was predisposed to love libraries and librarians. And the Central School library was great: colorful wall-to-wall carpeting, bean bags to sit on, lots and lots of books, bright windows, plants. The room was a regular classroom size, but it seemed huge.
Ms. Gold enjoyed my avid love of reading, but I also frustrated her, because at age eight, I was kind of stubbornly clinging to (good) picture books. For some reason I was avoiding longer chapter books. This was two years before I went to Prince Edward Island, with my family on vacation, and was given a copy of Anne of Green Gables, and before my uncle gave me a box set of paperback Sherlock Holmes books -- the complete stories, and also Roots, which is something like 800 pages long, and which clearly began my long love affair with huge, giant blockbuster novels-that-can-become-TV-serials. In third grade, I was stubborn. I would read books if they had short pieces in them, like the various colors Andrew Lang fairy tale books, or other collections of folktales and fairy tales from different cultures around the world. But at school, I would read picture books. And as I say, Ms. Gold was frustrated by my avoidance. She finally recommended a Young Adult fiction book to me and INSISTED that I check it out and read it. The funny thing is, I hated that book. I remember it quite well. It was The Court of the Stone Children, about two statues who occasionally came alive, or ghosts in a museum or something, but all the characters in it were depressed and kind of archaic. My clear thought, as I remember it, was "This is too old for me. This is for some teenagers. Who like depressing stuff." But despite the fact that I very much disliked that book, it somehow broke the logjam, and I began immediately to voraciously read longer books, sometimes indiscriminately adult-audience books, anything in my parents' book shelves, and ALMOST every Young Adult Fiction novel on the school library's shelves. One of the books that was an early favorite -- I might have gotten it from Scholastic, because I know I owned the paperback -- had a plot similarity to the Eleanor Cameron Court of the Stone Children. It was called Stoneflight by Georgess McHargue. Man, I miss that book. A girl with a problematic family (parents bickering? maybe?) who lives in an old apartment building in NYC and takes refuge on the roof, where there are stone carvings on the edge -- some gargoyles maybe, and definitely one griffin. And one night the griffin comes to life, and she flies on him over the city to a meeting of other statues-come-to-life, in Central Park. It's a great exploration of alienation (she wants to be an artist, too, I think, and sketches a lot, which I identified with) and sort of complicated magic. Everything is not neat and easy and the plot is not predictable (unlike, for instance, the Rick Riordan and for that matter the J. K. Rowling oeuvres). There was emotional weight to that book. Another reason I wish I could buy it used and instantly transform it into an ebook, sigh.
That's my memory. The transition from lingering in books for kids to reading more complicated works.
I remember the librarian at my elementary school quite well. Her name was Sherry Gold -- Ms. Gold, obviously, to my eight-year-old self. She was tall (or seemed tall to a eight year old) and thin and had bright red hair. I loved the school library, of course -- my mother was a librarian, I had always seen public libraries, whether in Madison or Evanston, as rich palaces of pleasure and comfort and enjoyment... back in the days before more than three TV stations or any other source of shows and movies (other than a movie theater: no video, no DVD, no computer) public libraries sometimes showed films, say on a weekend, or over a school holiday. In Madison, I remember watching avant garde children's movies about shapes and colors with just music, and also an animation of Ezra Keats' classic "The Snowy Day". In Evanston, I remember going to see the 1930s version of "The Secret Garden". These were rare treats, because otherwise you had to spend money at a theater if you could even get your parents' permission, or else watch the reliable three movies that came on regularly once each year: The Wizard of Oz, The Sound of Music, and Lilies of the Field. Were there others that were practically seasonal, like those? I'm not talking about Late Night Movies, but annually shown, and shared, movies.
ANYWAY, my point is that I was predisposed to love libraries and librarians. And the Central School library was great: colorful wall-to-wall carpeting, bean bags to sit on, lots and lots of books, bright windows, plants. The room was a regular classroom size, but it seemed huge.
Ms. Gold enjoyed my avid love of reading, but I also frustrated her, because at age eight, I was kind of stubbornly clinging to (good) picture books. For some reason I was avoiding longer chapter books. This was two years before I went to Prince Edward Island, with my family on vacation, and was given a copy of Anne of Green Gables, and before my uncle gave me a box set of paperback Sherlock Holmes books -- the complete stories, and also Roots, which is something like 800 pages long, and which clearly began my long love affair with huge, giant blockbuster novels-that-can-become-TV-serials. In third grade, I was stubborn. I would read books if they had short pieces in them, like the various colors Andrew Lang fairy tale books, or other collections of folktales and fairy tales from different cultures around the world. But at school, I would read picture books. And as I say, Ms. Gold was frustrated by my avoidance. She finally recommended a Young Adult fiction book to me and INSISTED that I check it out and read it. The funny thing is, I hated that book. I remember it quite well. It was The Court of the Stone Children, about two statues who occasionally came alive, or ghosts in a museum or something, but all the characters in it were depressed and kind of archaic. My clear thought, as I remember it, was "This is too old for me. This is for some teenagers. Who like depressing stuff." But despite the fact that I very much disliked that book, it somehow broke the logjam, and I began immediately to voraciously read longer books, sometimes indiscriminately adult-audience books, anything in my parents' book shelves, and ALMOST every Young Adult Fiction novel on the school library's shelves. One of the books that was an early favorite -- I might have gotten it from Scholastic, because I know I owned the paperback -- had a plot similarity to the Eleanor Cameron Court of the Stone Children. It was called Stoneflight by Georgess McHargue. Man, I miss that book. A girl with a problematic family (parents bickering? maybe?) who lives in an old apartment building in NYC and takes refuge on the roof, where there are stone carvings on the edge -- some gargoyles maybe, and definitely one griffin. And one night the griffin comes to life, and she flies on him over the city to a meeting of other statues-come-to-life, in Central Park. It's a great exploration of alienation (she wants to be an artist, too, I think, and sketches a lot, which I identified with) and sort of complicated magic. Everything is not neat and easy and the plot is not predictable (unlike, for instance, the Rick Riordan and for that matter the J. K. Rowling oeuvres). There was emotional weight to that book. Another reason I wish I could buy it used and instantly transform it into an ebook, sigh.
That's my memory. The transition from lingering in books for kids to reading more complicated works.