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!

Romney: Obama's Gift-Giving Beat Me

Mitt Romney isn’t running for president any longer, but he’s still our there saying odd things. My local paper this morning contains several snarky letters-to-the-editor about that conference call last week, where he said President Obama won a second term by giving “gifts” to special interest groups. Even Newt Gingrich and Bobby Jindal are on his case!

It feels weird to be on the same side with those guys (especially Newt), but I must also take exception to what Romney said. Of course, I wasn’t in on the call, so I didn’t actually hear him say it. But I’m told it went something like this:

"With regards to the young people, for instance, a forgiveness of college loan interest was a big gift. Free contraceptives were very big with young, college-aged women. And then, finally, Obamacare also made a difference for them, because as you know, anybody now 26 years of age and younger was now going to be part of their parents' plan, and that was a big gift to young people.”

The college loan interest isn’t one of my issues, but health care is. So I’ll start with those free contraceptives.

You may be right, Mitt. Getting pills and diaphragms without a copay might make life easier for many young women, and may have won some points for Obama. On the other hand, it’s just as likely that you lost points with your vow to “get rid” of Planned Parenthood, along with other things you’ve said about abortion and birth control. I was a college-aged woman in the 1970s. My primary concern wasn’t getting those services for free; it was being able to get them at all.

And those young adults who can stay on their parents’ health insurance until they’re 26? You’re not the first to take a pot-shot at that. Somewhere back in the campaign cycle, another guy -- it might have been Ron Paul -- said, well, if that’s going to be the rule, we ought to raise the voting age to 27.

I’m tired of hearing politicians speak of this provision like it was some kind of wild, new, un-American idea, because it isn’t.

First of all, it isn’t a “gift.” Young folks up to 26 can be covered on a parent’s health insurance policy if (a) the parent has health insurance, and (b) the parent agrees to keep the kid on as a dependent.

Parents may not have insurance. A lot of Americans don’t. Those parts of Obamacare that say we all have to get some and the insurance companies can’t refuse to sell it to us won’t kick in until 2014. If parents do have insurance, and choose to keep under-26 offspring on the policy, chances are it won’t be free. I’ve worked at places that had group health plans. Most paid at least part of the premium for the employees, but if I wanted coverage for my family, I’ve always had to pay extra for that.

Point two: Young adults need that insurance, and many don’t yet have the means to get their own. We’ve seen some job growth in recent months, but it’s still tough out there, especially for young folks just entering the market. When they find a job, it often comes without benefits. In the two weeks since the election, I’ve heard businesses wailing about Obamacare and how it’s going to break their budgets, how they can’t afford to provide health care for their employees, The complaints all seem to be coming from restaurant chains, and that’s where a lot of young adults work.

Point three: This is not a new idea. Before Obama signed the health care act, before he was elected to his first term, many existing health insurance plans (including the one at my company) offered coverage for unmarried dependents up to age 25. And I personally know quite a few parents who have used that option for kids who were still in school or still trying to find their place in the economy.

Under the new law, young adults can stay on until 26 and it doesn’t matter if they’re married. On this provision at least, Obamacare didn’t make a big, sweeping change. It simply took an existing industry practice, made a couple of incremental changes, and made it a required feature of any policy issued after September 23, 2010.

Gifts, indeed.