One of my ‘senior adulthood’ indulgences is re-reading books and stories first read or read to me in my youth, beginning say around age eight or nine. What began as an exercise in nostalgia gained interest when I realized that re-reading works that registered on me back then can help identify the development of attitudes and beliefs rooted in me to this day, or that – with a broader adult scope – I have consciously put aside.
I recall distinctly my excitement the first time I borrowed books from the Calgary Public Library. I actually remember the first two I took out, but while amusing they were not formative – except of my reading habit. More impact came from Dr. Seuss’s classic first published work, And To Think That I Saw It On Mulberry Street. In recent years I have read that Seuss regarded his story as displaying adult suppression of a free-spirited child’s healthy imagination. But the Marco of his tale did not go over with me. Some kids bugged me with their need to impress with tall tales. Some adults remain like that, their yarns more carefully crafted, but fantasy nonetheless.
One of the children’s novels the teacher read out to my Grade 5 class was set in an overlooked dark corner of Canadian history. A Land Divided’s background was the mid-1700s Acadian expulsions from Nova Scotia. The plot was fraught with a sense of menace from the French military further north, including Fort BeausĂ©jour at the top of the Bay of Fundy. In 1969 I paused on my honeymoon trip to Nova Scotia to look at the old outpost. I was surprised to realize the site had been little more than a military company position. Further to the north, the mighty Louisbourg fortress on Cape Breton Island was an even more powerful adversary worrying the participants in the book. This past January I was in Sydney, and was disappointed to learn that the re-created fortress was closed for the season – I would dearly have loved a look around.
The novel had won the Governor General’s Award a few years earlier. I doubt it would these days. What I did not spot in listening to the tale read out 57 years ago was readily apparent to my adult eyes. The book whitewashed the British decision to deport the Acadians. Back in 1955 justifying such governmental decisions sounded natural enough to a youth acutely conscious of his British birth and heritage. In later years, aware that relatives disappeared in 1941 when Stalin ordered the Volga Germans expelled from the southern Volga region they had inhabited for a century and a half, I am more attuned to the personal impact of draconian measures justified by invoking state security.
Another book I actually read back in my elementary school days was Champs On Ice, unusual in being a hockey novel by an American author and set in an American university. I was struck by the novel’s grown-up collegiate atmosphere featuring fraternities and even a student newspaper. Studies were mentioned in the yarn, but definitely not highlighted nor seemingly a major concern of the busy characters. Perhaps this perception underlay my overly casual approach toward matters academic later during my first year at the old Royal Roads Military College. I nearly failed out. Fortunately there were no time diverting fraternities at a military college, and while I became a frequent contributor to the cadet newspapers, I was considerably more attentive to the professors over the next three years.
St. Albert resident David Haas has long been a compulsive reader.
