When I was 8 years old, my family made the 130-mile move across Georgia from the metropolis of Columbus to Milledgeville. This was a devastating event, as summer had just begun and the new neighborhood had nary a potential playmate in sight (my dad was a prison warden, and the house was on State property, next to the town's legendary Mental Institutions).
That summer, my mom took us regularly to the city library, where I quickly discovered new friends: Nancy Drew, Joe and Frank Hardy, the Happy Hollister siblings, the Bobbsey Twins and, best of all, Trixie Belden. After dealing with my daily and very boring duties of snapping beans, helping mom can produce, household chores and tending to my younger sister (ack...such treasured memories, now!), I looked forward to spending free time with these upbeat sleuths and their interesting lives and adventures. Trixie was my favorite. She was closer to my age and we seemed to share the same spunk, curiosity and interest - except her new neighbor was a millionaire girl of the same age with horses and free vacation opportunities. But I digress - this is all fresh on my mind because I have recently reunited with some of these old summer pals. And boy, oh, boy, what a surprise. Nostalgia aside, I am aghast at some of the sexist and racist overtones (most prevalent in the original Bobbsey Twins - copyright 1904), not to mention just bad writing in some of the latter Nancy Drew stories. Some of these I could not even finish. However, the gal that still rings true to my heart, then and now, dear old BFF Trixie Belden is still tops. In rereading the adventures of these somewhat outdated kids, I am still struck by the repeated themes that reflect values and preferences I hold true today: the importance of friends and family, the love of productive work and good times, information-reasoning-deducting, a good pair of dungarees, and most importantly, the explorer's dream: a sack lunch of thick ham sandwiches and a thermos of lemonade.
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| Here is my girl, Trixie, on the left in the Kindle edition (updated look, a little too glamorous, in my opinion), and one of my cherished collector volumes on the left.
As an educator and librarian, this is just further proof of the influence of early reading in our lives. The imagination that is spurred by context of the written word can make lifelong impressions. As much as I love sharing treasured books with the young readers in my life, it is also important to seek out what they like. Why do they like it? How do they relate their life to the story? Does the book spur ideas for what they would like to learn, to do, to be?
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