Maine’s de facto summer came to an end for school-aged students and their teachers this week. Most are still traumatized by the realization there will be 10 long, cold, dark months of homework, squabbling with boyfriends and/or girlfriends, raking leaves, cleaning gutters, shoveling snow, clearing brush, pulling weeds, taking out trash, and enduring various other chore-related indignities until next summer’s vacation begins. And it’s not going to be easy for the kids, either!
My personal Priority Number One during the two months just past was to effect a particular change of attitude in our three children, ages 13, 11 and 8. All loudly professed to believe libraries are boring, which meant an intervention was in order. Toward that end, I arranged for regular trips to our local, publicly funded information and entertainment center.
Walter Cronkite once observed, “Whatever the cost of our libraries, the price is cheap compared to that of an ignorant nation.” But that didn’t make much of an impression on the three young Youngs, none of whom had ever heard of the man who was America’s most trusted news source about three decades before they were born. When I announced we’d be regularly trekking to our local library, our oldest wailed, “Nooooooooooo!” in a voice suggesting he had just been told he was going to the electric chair rather than to a conveniently located building filled with unlimited knowledge, wisdom and ideas, not to mention friendly and helpful people. His sister’s lower-decibel reaction was equally unenthusiastic; their inert little brother, mesmerized by an electronic screen he was focused on, grunted non-verbal disapproval as well.
But reasonably experienced parents have long since accepted that raising one’s children isn’t always a popularity contest, so off we went, protests and all.
On our initial visit, the children did what all rational human beings do: they adjusted. Number One Son parked himself in the periodicals section and began devouring every issue of Popular Science he could get his hands on. His sister headed for the adolescent fiction section, found the Percy Jackson series, and dove into them so enthusiastically that we had to go back more than once a week just to keep up with her. Child Number Three, after being told that playing mindless electronic games at the library is no better than playing them at home, discovered a treasure trove of Mad Magazine issues. (Full disclosure: I loved Mad when I was his age. If allowing him to read such subversive material is bad parenting, I have to plead guilty.)
The hidden agenda for this summer’s Library Project: Unbeknownst to the young trio with whom I share a last name, as a teen, their father was a knuckle-dragging underachiever nearly as fixated on athletics as he was perversely opposed to reading anything deeper than the back of a baseball card. That attitude, which he stubbornly clung to for far longer than he should have, didn’t serve him well in school, or during the decade or so after his formal education ended. His aversion to reading made it significantly more difficult to find any meaningful direction in life, and also lengthened the time it took to do so.
As a bonus for taking on the arduous summer-long library project, I got to do some role modeling and pick out some books myself. I read “1942,” a chilling fictional account of what might have happened had Japan pressed her advantage after bombing Pearl Harbor. I laughed through “The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid,” Bill Bryson’s terrific memoir of growing up in Iowa in the 1950s. My emotions got a workout reading “For One More Day” and “The Five People you Meet in Heaven,” two short books by reformed sportswriter Mitch Albom, and I got utterly absorbed in (and enraged by) Jon Krakauer’s “Where Men Win Glory,” the tale of NFL football star Pat Tillman’s untimely demise and its unseemly aftermath.
And the week before school, I found Harry Truman’s “Excellent Adventure,” Matthew Algeo’s thoroughly-researched, delightful account of the 33rd president’s three-week, 2,500-mile, cross-country drive from Independence, Missouri to the East Coast and back six months after he left office in 1953. Who knew that back then there was no Secret Service protection for ex-presidents and their spouses, nor was there even a pension for retired commanders-in-chief! One of the book’s many highlights: the memories of the state trooper who pulled over a Chrysler on the Pennsylvania Turnpike for obstructing traffic by driving too slowly in the left lane only to discover that the car’s driver had been the leader of the free world just six months earlier.
Doing all that reading was great. But even better: Now our children would choose a trip to the library over going to the dentist!
Well, at least two-thirds of them would.
— Andy Young lives in Cumberland and teaches English in York County.
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