Back When There Was Magic...

When I was a kid there was a lot of magic in the world. Much of it was in the backyards of my two grandmother's houses. Both of them lived in big houses with very big yards and lots of gardens and fruit trees and wonderful and amazing places to hide. Gram Werner's house had a grape arbor and two apple trees, a pear tree that was great for climbing, a little nook formed by old lilac bushes, and a huge hemlock tree that you could crawl under and no one would know you were there.

Grandma Valentine's house also had some good climbing trees --- I have pictures of myself in her crab apple tree when I was 5 or 6. There were lots of currant bushes along the back alley which was a wonder all by itself, and whole stand of apple trees in which a lot of birds lived and peony bushes lining the driveway which was made of brick. Both had big porches with swings.

The reason it was good to have grandmothers who had great places to hide was because that was where the best reading got done. I was a reader right from the start. I remember my Uncle Tommy giving me a dollar and me pestering my mother all day until she finished up her chores and would walk with me to Al Marsh's store back on Erie Avenue where they sold Nancy Drew books. Al Marsh's was supposed to be a stationary store but he had all kinds of stuff in there and even more in the basement. Al Marsh himself always wore dark suits and worked behind the counter. He was big and bald and kind of reminded me of Alfred Hitchcock. I'm not sure why. If you asked him for something you didn't see in the store he'd say, "wait a minute" and he'd go down in his basement. Before long he would come up holding whatever it was you wanted. I used to try to imagine what his basement looked like.

So anyway, we'd go to Al Marsh's and buy a Nancy Drew book and then walk to my grandmother's house and while the grownups visited it was magic time under the pine tree or on the porch spring hoping that my mother wouldn't make me leave during a "good part".

Later my brother Jack and I discovered my Grandfather Werner's bookcase. Grandpa died many years before we were born but Gram had kept his books in a bookcase in her "middle" bedroom. He had leather-bound sets of books by Edgar Allen Poe, Mark Twain, James Fenimore Cooper, James Oliver Curwood, and two amazing collections American Classics and World Classics. It took me awhile to figure out that "World" meant England and France back then --- and Spain for Don Quixote, but that was all.

I was a quiet reader. I loved getting lost in books and dreaming about them. Jack was the kind of reader who had to talk about everything he read --- not discuss it really, just tell you the story as he read it. He'd finish a chapter and then he'd make me put my book down and he'd tell me what he just read, "So there's this guy named Hawkeye, see..." When Jack discovered the Kazan books about wolves I got so sick of hearing about wolves I finally told him to shut up.

But oh those books were full of wonder. I also discovered my mother's collection of books by Daphne DuMaurier and the Brontes. It was all so astonishing and delicious. There were characters you identified with (Jane Eyre) and places you longed to visit (Wuthering Heights and and Green Dolphin Street and, of course, Manderly). And there were the men you fell in love with just because they had such cool names (Uther Pendragon and D'Artagnan). What magic --- what amazing magic.

I've been thinking about this because I've been browsing the books that have been formatted for Amazon's Kindle and wondering if the magical experience of discovering your grandfather's copy of Huckleberry Finn, with parts of it underlined in fading pencil and imagining your teenaged grandfather reading that part over and over, is now a lost joy. But I suppose crawling up in Gram's pear tree with a new Nancy Drew seems archaic and strange these days. Oh well, as long as there are readers in this world there will still be magic.

Thanks for reading.