Childhood Revived

It is the glory of God to conceal a thing: but the honour of kings is to search out a matter. Proverbs 25:2 KJV

I promised last week that I would review a book that I awarded my “Stocking Stuffer of the Year Award” as my pick for “best gift of Christmas, 2008.” It is The Daring Book for Girls by Andrea J. Buchanan and Miriam Peskowitz.* It is an all encompassing book of everything you ever wanted to know about as a pre-teen girl but didn’t know how to ask. In one volume, your young ladies can find out about pressing flowers, how to whistle with two fingers, double Dutch jump rope (complete with rhymes), how to negotiate a salary, bird watching, how to make a stink bomb, reading tide charts, snowballs, and Abigail Adams’ letters to John Adams. I was fascinated with the wealth of eye-opening information it contained about both the off-beat and the profound.

It took me back to my childhood when, as a boy of 8 & 9, my family lived in one of those old two-story, four bedroom homes that, to my delight, had a full basement and a full standup, walk-in attic. It was the basement and attic that drew me like a magnet on Saturdays and summer days as I indulged a strong sense of curiosity. The basement contained my brother’s hamster cages and my dad’s workshop where I made my first woodworking project, a small boat modeled after the large iron ore cruisers on the Great Lakes. I still have it.

The attic was where I discovered a fully illustrated, hard-bound edition of Gulliver’s Travels, a ready adventure for any slow afternoon. There was also a box of old National Geographics that took me around the world. But ever fascinating was the old, stand-up radio that stood facing the top of the stairs. It had a large, green eye at the top of the circular dial which lit up whenever the set was turned on. There, at the turn of a knob, were various wavelengths that advertised such exotic locations as Moscow, London, and Tokyo. I would spend hours scanning the airwaves and reading into even the most obscure static evidence of life on other continents. Those were magical days spent in stuffy attics or cruising the neighborhood on a beat up wagon, conquering the kingdoms of vacant lots, building clubhouses, or taking off on 2-3 mile walks downtown with my buddies to cruise the pet shop, model store, and ride the elevator at the five & dime.

I identify completely with the following introduction to the Daring book:

We were girls in the days before the Web, cell phones, or even voicemail. Telephones had cords and were dialed by, well, actually dialing. We listened to
records and cassette tapes—we were practically grown-ups before CDs came to pass—and more often than not, we did daring things like walk to school by ourselves. Ride our banana-seat bikes to the local store. Babysit when we were still young enough to be babysat ourselves. Spent hours on our own, playing hopscotch or tetherball, building a fort in our rooms, or turning our suburban neighborhood into the perfect setting for covert ops, impromptu ball games, and imaginary medieval kingdoms.

Girls today are girls of the twenty-first century, with email accounts, digital cable, iPods, and complex video games. Their childhood is in many ways much cooler than ours—what we would have given for a remote control, a rock-climbing wall, or video chatting! In other ways, though, girlhood today has become high-pressured and competitive, and girls are inducted into grownup-hood sooner, becoming tweens and teens and adult women before their time.

In the face of all this pressure, we present stories and projects galore, drawn from the vastness of history, the wealth of girl knowledge, the breadth of sport, and the great outdoors. Consider the Daring Book for Girls a book of possibilities and ideas for filling a day with adventure, imagination—and fun. The world is bigger than you can imagine, and its yours for the exploring—if you dare. Bon voyage.

Yes, thankfully, there is The Dangerous Book for Boys which is the male equivalent. I have not seen it, but the introduction promises much the same from authors Conn and Hal Iggulden:

Boyhood is all about curiosity, and men and boys can enjoy stories of Scott of the Antarctic and Joe Simpson in “Touching the Void” as much as they can raid a shed for the bits to make an electromagnet, or grow a crystal, build a go-cart, and learn how to find north in the dark. You'll find famous battles in these pages, insects and dinosaurs—as well as essential Shakespeare quotes, how to cut flint heads for a bow and arrow, and instructions on making the best paper airplane in the world. How do latitude and longitude work? How do you make secret ink, or send the cipher that Julius Caesar used with his generals?

You'll find the answers inside. It was written by two men who would have given away the cat to get this book when they were young. It wasn't a particularly nice cat. Why did we write it now? Because these things are important still and we wished we knew them better. There are few things as satisfying as tying a decent bowline knot when someone needs a loop, or simply knowing what happened at Gettysburg and the Aamo. The tales must be told and retold, or the memories slowly die.

There are a couple of pages you will probably wish to excise with a razor blade before giving them into the hands of your children. Palm reading and Yoga are not something we wish to perpetuate, but the overwhelming majority is wholesome and exciting. You will need to read through yourself to check for content, but that will not be a hard job as you will find it telling all the stuff you wish you had known in 3rd grade. You can learn more about these books at http://www.daringbookforgirls.com/ and http://www.dangerousbookforboys.com/. The Walters family already has both books and Vashti adds:

"The Daring Book will make you long for rainy days! It was a birthday gift to our third grade daughter, Amelia, last year, and it instantly became a treasured resource. Together we've learned how to make the 'Coolest Paper Airplane Ever,' tried one of 'Three Silly Pranks,' and are longing to soon put the chapter on 'Snowballs' to good use! When asked what her favorite part of the book was, Amelia told me about a 'very pretty poem' and showed me the page. I read with new eyes, 'A Bird Came Down the Walk' by Emily Dickinson. It is such an unusual wealth of information all in one very nice hard-bound book. We gave our son the companion book for boys this Christmas and although we have not finished reading the entire book, it promises to be just as wholesome and enjoyable."

*Harper Collins, 2007, sell for @ $18.00 each on Amazon.com

This will preach!

"And he spake many things unto them in parables, saying, Behold, a sower went forth to sow." Matt. 13:3

Poets and preachers ply much the same trade. They rummage about in old sheds and ploughed fields always casting a keen eye for odd bits of iron or stone, trinket or toy, broken or whole that tell a story. Picking up the oddest specimens of the everyday, the common, the familiar, they discover them to be treasuries of meaning; Rosetta stones that unlock mysteries of morality and truth. They look beyond the obvious to translate for us the tales of significance and value locked in their earth worn covers much like the bilingual person can read to us from a cast off book written in a foreign tongue.

Jesus was pre-eminent among them taking sheep, bread, wheat, and wages and unleashing from them pictures for the eyes of our imaginations that leaped the barriers of literacy, prejudice, status, or age. Olive trees became discourses and wineskins, dissertations that conveyed truth down into our souls with a sweetness and ease that disarmed our defenses and silenced the critics of our hearts, at least for the moment. Caesar’s coin in the hands of the carpenter’s son defeated even the most devious of minds and most relentless of foes and left them silent, their entrapments in shambles, their arguments destroyed.

Long after the terminology was lost, the picture remains, burned into the memory like the heat and brilliance of a grand fire. Grandma Shown was good at it, too. When the children unwittingly tripped us up, she would sermonize succinctly and simply: “When they are young, they step on your toes. When they are old, they step on your heart.” She had known both, in spades. Herman Melville was a master at seeing the universal in the particular and proclaimed doggedly, “And some certain significance lurks in all things, else all things are little worth, and the round world itself but an empty cipher, except to sell by the cartload, as they do hills about Boston, to fill up some morass in the Milky Way.” His masterpiece, Moby Dick, is awash in moralizing at every turn with deep reflections on life taken from the everyday experiences of a whaler, in all their beauty and terror.

For one, Melville takes considerable time to describe the careful path of the harpoon rope laid about in the whale boat before it followed its mark with a whizzing that could take off a leg or arm or snatch one into a watery grave. It actually lay across arms and shoulders as it trailed from its coiled lair, innocent as “the seemingly harmless rifle holds the fatal powder, and the ball.” It was the thing which carried “more of true terror than any other aspect of this dangerous affair.” But why say more, he adds. “All men live enveloped in whale lines. All are born with halters round their necks; but it is only when caught in the swift, sudden turn of death, that mortals realize the silent, subtle, ever-present perils of life.”

Following the tradition, I continue to exclaim for all to hear at every cluttered closet and tangled garden hose, “Chaos always descends from order! Order never descends from chaos!” (A pox on Darwin and all his kin!) Come to my woodshop and you are likely to hear, “If you work with wood, you will get slivers. If you work with people, you will get hurt.” Young preachers (& teachers) need forewarning. Can we see the eternal significance in those things that surround us each day and point them out to young ears as lessons for the heart? “Go to the ant, thou sluggard, and consider her ways” the Scripture says, and so we look beneath our feet and see wisdom for the taking. Through eyes of faith and vision, we, too, can see the treasure in the common and exclaim with sudden discovery and joy, “This will preach!”

Brave New World

I am also including a piece I have submitted to our local newspaper in response to a fellow who wants to legalize assisted suicide for the elderly. It might not make a whole lot of sense if you have not read his, but I include it at no extra charge. Feel free to respond anytime. Thankfully, your rotten tomatoes cannot travel through cyberspace.....

Al Westerfield is not alone, unfortunately, among those who in a fit of Brave New World mentality propose suicide as a surefire cure for the ills of old age. No, there are no laws against suicide. Prosecution poses serious problems. And suicide certainly meets all the criterion of purely utilitarian reasoning. I have a great book for those who are enthralled with such thinking entitled The Nazi Conscience by Claudia Koonz. It details all sorts of utilitarian solutions for social ills, all imposed with great ulterior aims and braced by philosophic arguments of the highest order.

Anyone making a case for legalizing suicide must first dismiss the antiquated values of the Christian faith. Westerfield does this, as many before him, by hiding behind the flimsy veil of the doctrine of “separation of church and state.” No one, we are told, should be allowed to impose their religious beliefs on all. In one fell swoop, he dismisses all Christians from participating in the Democratic process because they are tainted with religious belief. Effectively disenfranchised, we evidently should be content with allowing only atheists and agnostics to form the laws of our nation. However, slavery could very well still exist if it were not for the abolitionists who led the fight to impose their Christian morality upon the South.

The idea of legalizing assisted suicide seems so innocuous when confined to discussions of the terminally ill. This animal does not observe nice fences, however, and quickly invades the body politic creating all sorts of malicious mischief. Eager heirs are always standing ready to jump the gun. The medical profession can easily be corrupted to make decisions of life and death based upon the bottom line. Our culture can soon be seduced to evaluate life in terms of “meaningfulness” versus “cost to society.” It is a slippery slope leading back to the Spartan culture of old where babies were inspected upon birth and the weak thrown off cliffs.

Most insinuating of all, this talk of the “nobility of suicide” becomes a black hole that sucks those suffering from depression, no matter what age or medical condition, into its irreversible grasp. I have lost three friends to suicide already. Only one was suffering a terminal illness. Depression is a disease of worthlessness, a feeling that one is a burden to family, friends, and society. I am glad my 93 year old mother did not read Mr. Westerfield’s article. She is making a valiant effort to cling to her dignity and sense of worth through her declining days. The last thing she needs is a voice telling her to end it and save us all a lot of trouble. How cruel.

Assisted suicide and the mentality supporting it puts man in the role of playing God. That is a burden no man was meant to bear. We aren’t doing all that well at running a County Commission let alone take on the task of deciding who is meant to die and when.

young stories

Barbara Walters has a new book out entitled, Audition; a story of her life. In it she makes one statement about her famous interviews over the years that reveal one of her strategies. She always makes it a point to inquire about the subject’s childhood for she feels that much of our life is shaped by our young and growing up years. For herself, she tells how she was raised in a somewhat dysfunctional home where her parents’ marriage was weak and, at one point, extremely tenuous. Her father was seldom home due to a successful career managing nightclubs that sometimes brought her into contact with the rich and famous. She had a special-needs older sister for whom she felt a keen responsibility. She developed some negotiating skills just holding this family together. It was not an easy life as one might suspect.

I’ve been reading a book, Makers of the Modern World, by Louis Untermeyer, which fills in some short periods of solitude with quick reads regarding the various movers and shakers of our modern age from Herman Melville to Karl Marx to Mary Baker Eddy. I find that it is richly informing the way I view these famous personages.

Melville suffered a traumatic change of familial circumstances around age 11 when his father’s business failed. Never recovering from this reverse, the father became physically and mentally ill eventually dying of a stroke while in his forties. Herman struggled to finish school, tried his hand at teaching, and finally signed up as a cabin boy at age 20 on a ship headed for Liverpool. It was here that he became enthralled and repelled by a life at sea. Another trip in 1841 took him on board a whaling ship which he later declared to be his Yale College and his Harvard. Jumping ship at a tropical waypoint, he lived among cannibals for a while until escaping to another whaling ship, suffered through a full mutiny, and ended up joining the U.S. Navy. At age 25, he finally headed home to live with his mother and began to write. At age 31, he began his masterpiece, Moby Dick, and went on to live a life of relative obscurity, financial hardship, and general unhappiness.

Walt Whitman was the 2nd of nine children born to a country carpenter and illiterate mother, a family distinguished only in fruitlessness. His schooling was over at age 11 and at age 12, he was a printer’s apprentice and soon migrated into newspaper work. His early writing was described as “turgid” and “lurid” and his poetry even worse. He turned out hackwork and bounced around from job to job. Finally, at age 35, his experimentations with free verse took root, and he came out with his first version of “Leaves of Grass.” He cultivated a new image of the common man and battled poor reviews with his own self-promotion. Critics called his poetry a “mass of bombast, egotism, vulgarity, and nonsense.” They equated him with “some escaped lunatic raving in pitiable delirium.” Whitman redeemed his image through service as a nurse during the civil war, but soon fell into old age riddled by poverty and illness; living out his last days in a dingy room next to a railway crossing, kept alive by the charity of others.

These stories make me want to go back and pick up their writings and read them through entirely new lenses. Everyone has a story, and it has in large part shaped the person they have become. I rejoice at the happy childhoods I see around me everyday for these will be the solid ones when others are losing their way. Take time to share your story with them so that they, too, will see you as more than just “mom” and just “dad.” It will bond them closer to you and help them understand much for knowing your journey.