The Wind Call - by Rosalie K. Fry

My Favorite Childhood Reads

This book, with its worn hardback cover, has been with me perhaps longer than any other. Mom and Dad would read me chapters at bedtime before I learned to read on my own. The author shares our family name. I’ve often wondered if that’s why my parents (or grandparents?) bought the book.

It’s the story of a tiny boy, a child of the Little People, who arrives unexpectedly in an English garden. An assortment of birds is checking out a strange new plant, something the gardener brought home from a recent holiday in the tropics, when they find the dark-eyed infant sleeping in a flower. The kid is obviously far from home with no one to take care of him. So a pair of songbirds takes him to their nest in a hawthorn tree, and he grows up with three newly hatched chicks.

The “wind call” in the title is that subtle change in the air that marks the approach of fall, telling migratory birds that it’s time to fly south. Father Blackcap sings the little ones to sleep every night with a song about the great flight and their sunny winter home by the Mediterranean Sea.

When his adopted brothers are ready for their first flying lesson, the boy, Pierello, is old enough to climb out of the nest and make his way to the ground. He spends an idyllic summer learning to fend for himself in the woods: picking wild berries, sliding down little waterfalls in the burbling stream, consorting with glow-worms, butterflies, dormice, and all types of birds. There are line drawings of Pierello and his friends, and a half-dozen color pictures printed on special paper. Behind all these happy adventures looms the novel’s Big Question: will this wingless child find a way to go south with his family when the Wind Call comes?

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Looking back, I wonder if my love of nature began with this fairy tale. Many of its creatures were (and still are) unfamiliar to a kid growing up in Texas, but I’ve always suspected the portrayals were accurate. Today, thanks to the Internet, it’s not hard to check. I did some surfing and found that yes, male and female blackcaps do share chick-rearing duties. Nightjars really do fly silently and lay their camouflaged eggs on bare ground.

And what about the author and illustrator, Rosalie K. Fry? I didn't think I'd ever heard of her, aside from this book. But it turns out she wrote several others, and one became the basis for the indie film The Secret of Roan Inish. Wow. Who knew?

The Zany World of Dr. Seuss

My Favorite Childhood Reads

Dr. Seuss has his own Facebook wall. The Grinch is all over it, urging visitors to “grow your heart 3 sizes” by doing a good deed each day from now until Christmas.

I read some odd books as a kid. In some ways, Dr. Seuss’s books are among the oddest – but they’re also some of the best known and universally loved. Who doesn’t instantly recognize the Cat in the Hat’s red-striped stovepipe? Who couldn’t, on command, recite a few lines of Green Eggs and Ham?

I think The Cat in the Hat was the first Seuss book I read. I loved it. It was so much better than those dull Dick-and-Jane readers we used in primary school. I was even more fascinated when the Cat came back, left a nasty ring in his unwilling hosts’ bathtub, and wound up staining the whole hillside a garish pink.

Having gotten acquainted with the distinctive look of Dr. Seuss characters, I started to seek them out whenever I went to the library. I met Horton the elephant, Sam-I-Am, Bartholomew Cubbins of the 500 hats, the pointlessly prejudiced Sneetches, the parade of wildly fanciful creatures that marched across the pages of If I Ran the Zoo and If I Ran the Circus (two of my favorites.) And of course the immortal Grinch, who tried to eliminate Christmas and wound up saving himself.

I am clearly not the only kid who never forgot these stories. Just last night I went Christmas caroling with a group of friends. We came upon a front-yard display with life-size cutouts of the Grinch, his dog Max and a whole village of Whos. No kids in sight, just a middle-aged man who came out to listen. We sang him all six verses of “You’re a Mean One, Mr. Grinch” from the movie version of How the Grinch Stole Christmas.

As a writer, I have other reasons to admire Dr. Seuss. His galloping verses, so easy to read, couldn’t have been easy to write. But he kept turning them out, decade upon decade, still publishing new works long after I grew up. The Seuss Enterprises website says there are 44 books under the name of Dr. Seuss, plus 22 more that he wrote under other pen names. Okay, none of them is a tome like War and Peace, but still. Each one tells a story, or presents a new idea, or makes a point. And of course he did his own illustrations, too.

Here’s a bit that’s often mentioned in writers’ workshops, when they’re coaching us on the kind of determination it may take to break into the publishing market: Dr. Seuss’s first kiddie book, And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street, was turned down by at least twenty publishers. They didn’t know what to do with it. They couldn’t see where it fit. What if he’d given up after the tenth rejection letter? Or the 12^th, or the 15^th? This story lives in my memory bank and pops up whenever I need reminding: if I really have something to say, don’t let the naysayers hush me up.

Theodor Seuss Geisel had plenty to say, and he’s still saying it. Go to the kids’ section of your library, your favorite bookstore, and you’ll see. Pull up one of the movies based on his books (they're still making new ones!) Or go check out some holiday decorations.

Tent Under the Spider Tree - by Gene Inyart

My Favorite Childhood Reads

Around ten years ago, when some people I work with got involved in the Children & Nature Network, I started thinking of this novel that I read and loved in elementary school. A book about three girls who spent a summer camping out alone. They slept in a tent, explored field and stream, and faced an invading horde of daddy longlegs (hence the title).

Having just read Richard Louv’s Last Child in the Woods, I found myself wondering if I’d made the whole thing up. Three pre-adolescents in a tent by themselves? That book was in my grade-school library. Would it even be allowed today?

Curiosity aroused, I got online and tracked down a copy of Tent Under the Spider Tree. It really is as good as I remembered. Short chapters written for kids, characters with distinct personalities, plenty of action.

My recollection was a little fuzzy. The girls camped out for a week, not a whole season. They weren’t entirely unsupervised: there was a farmhouse nearby, and a daily check-in with the family that lived there. But still. The girls slept every night in their tent by a stream. They couldn’t see the house from their camp. They prepared their own meals and survived mosquitoes, gnats and leeches. They had disagreements, but worked things out without adult intervention. At week’s end, they knew they’d had an experience they would never forget.

What a contrast with the kids described in Richard Louv’s book, who have lost touch with the natural world. The Children & Nature movement, working to reverse this trend, is finding out we also need to pry Mom and Dad away from their desks and computers and cars, because parents don’t let kids run free any more. Even if they want to, society tends not to let them. Two years ago, a single mom was arrested for letting her 9-year-old play at a park while she was at work. In the daytime, with a cell phone. And that wasn’t an isolated case.

The girls in Spider Tree didn’t have cell phones. That book was published in 1959. I found it in the early ‘60s. To my fourth-grade self, it read like a marvelous adventure, but not especially far-fetched. Today, it seems like a fairy tale: nearly as fantastic as the Harry Potter series. As dated, in its way, as those Betsy-Tacy stories that took place over a century ago.

The Betsy Books - by Maud Hart Lovelace

My Favorite Childhood Reads

There were a bunch of these books, and I think I read them all. Betsy-Tacy was first in the series, set, as I recall, in the very early 1900s. Two little girls met and became Best Friends. In a subsequent book they bonded with another girl called “Tib” (short for Thelma), and became a threesome. The girls grew up together, went to school, moved on to high school. Readers got to know their families: Betsy had a big sister, Julia; and I think Tacy had several siblings. As time went on, Betsy left home, spent time abroad, and got married.

It’s been many years since I read these books. I don’t recall any intricate plots; it was more slice-of-life stuff, how it was to be a girl growing up in that time. Just a few incidents stick in my mind. Some members of Tacy’s family caught scarlet fever or some other contagious disease, and the whole household went under quarantine. Years later, Betsy was living in a German boarding house, doing personal hygiene with a basin and washrag. She found out there was a real bathtub in the building, reserved for the use of army officers, and talked a couple of housemaids into smuggling her in for a real bath.

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More information about Betsy, Tacy and friends

My Favorite Childhood Reads

A funny thing has been happening in my mind these past few months. I’ll be going about my daily routine and suddenly find myself thinking of a book I read when I was a kid. I’ll recall scenes, characters, and whole sequences of events. Sometimes it’s a book I haven’t thought about in decades. Sometimes it’s a more familiar story, one of those I always suspected I would never forget. (I should mention here that I have vintage copies of several childhood favorites. They live on the top shelf of a bookcase in my writing room.)

Perhaps, at age 60, I’m starting to enter a second childhood. Maybe some part of my psyche figures it’s time to climb into the attic of my mind and sort through the piles of stuff that are lying around in there.

When something interesting turns up in the attic, it’s fun to share with friends. In the coming weeks, I’ll post mini-reviews of my favorite childhood reads. Some are classics that anyone would recognize. Others may be obscure, and I’ll be interested to find out if any of my friends also read them. Feel free to comment and share!