Summer Reading List
Summer Reading List
by Constance Bates
I always had one -- a summer reading list, that is. We read all summer long, my friends and I,
for pleasure; that was one of the advantages of child care within a family that
didn't believe in television. And with five children of her own, plus me and
various hangers-on, with automobile fuel so cheap that "gas war" meant two
corner stations trying to undersell each other, and free-flowing library cards,
Mrs.DeWitt ran us to the Arlington Library weekly.
It was unbelievably small, that library, but modeled
after a Southern mansion or D.C. monument, with great white columns in front,
topping wide, tall steps, and we were awed even to be allowed in. I can almost imagine my caregiver now,
calculating silently how much of that day each week might be whiled away with
the gathering of due books, the finding of shoes, the drive downtown, herding us
in, with the browsing and whispery arguing and checking out done under the
proprietary eyes of authority figures other than herself. At the time, I believed she was sacrificially granting this half-a-day weekly for us; motherhood alone has altered my perspective. Nonetheless, we were easily the most literate
bunch of ragamuffins on our street.
When we found a book we liked, we chugged that author down
like ice-cold Kool-Aid. It was a
disappointment to find that some children's authors also wrote adult or
nonfiction books with nothing good in them, but we didn't waiver in our search.
With no TV in the house, outdoors we played ourselves to sweaty heaving lumps
of dirty tanned flesh, and once indoors, falling limply to the floor, we grabbed
a book on the way down.
We read and re-read old favorites. (The final Sue Barton book actually had the D-Word
in it, the first I'd ever seen in print!)
Donna, the second-oldest DeWitt daughter, introduced me
to Grace Livingston Hill, and we devoured those antiquated Christian romances
one after the other. As children, we were
allowed to check out seven books at a time, which meant 14 novels for Donna and
I to read and exchange. If you're
unfamiliar with them, here are the plots of Hill's more than 100 novels as I remember them:
1. Beautiful,
mild-mannered, poverty-stricken Christian woman meets handsome, rich, worldly
man. He falls in love, becomes a godly man, and they live happily ever after as
a rich Christian couple.
2. Handsome,
moral, poverty-stricken Christian man meets beautiful, rich, worldly woman. She
falls in love, becomes a godly woman, and they live happily ever after as a
rich Christian couple.
3. Rich,
worldly woman meets rich, worldly man. They become Christians and give up their
worldly goods to live happily ever after.
We never tired of her unique moral perspectives, all three
of them, the beautiful characters, the poignant real-life message, and the hope
that someday, if we were only moral and poor enough, we would meet and marry our
handsome, rich, worldly-but-willing-to-convert men. If you thought it couldn't happen, we could
point to over 100 places where it already had.
If you argued that folks who were already rich in her novels finally
believed wealth allowed them no peace and gave it all up, we were ready to
argue that that was only if
you were already rich. We weren't;
we deserved those men.
My parents, by the DeWitt's standards, were already rich. Granted, we lived in the same post-war ticky-tacky
housing development. Every house shared the same houseplan -- ours faced west,
theirs faced east, continuing that way throughout the tract as reliably as a
Grace Livingston Hill plot. But we were worlds apart in other ways: The DeWitts,
my "other family", had five children plus me; across the chain-link fence, I
was an only child. Mr. DeWitt was a postal carrier and his wife a stay-at-home;
I was a latch-key kid, with the only slim, beauty-shop-coiffed,
store-bought-dressed, full-time working mother anybody had ever heard of. The
DeWitts had one vehicle at any given time (I remember a "woody", eventally the
fave of the 60s surfers, with its wood paneling along the sides, but still a
little quirky in its time), and a pre-air conditioning Ford Econoline that I
called "that fat hot black van"; my folks seldom had fewer than three cars, typically
less than two years old (a Mercury with white-walls in the beginning,
eventually a replaced-every-two-years Cadillac Coupe de Ville, a six-tail-lights-across Thunderbird, and
in 1966 my own Karmann Ghia), and whatever wreck was in alteration progress in our
garage.
My mother dressed me from
high-tone department stores and specialty dress shops in clothes so high
quality they probably still haven't worn out; the DeWitt boys wore Sears levis,
and the girls wore handmade clothes and hand-me-downs -- some hand-me-downed
from me, launching another difference: My mother and I took the laundered and
pressed clothes to them after shade of dark, and I was charged never to mention
I'd worn them before, while the girls were giddy with excitement, and never
failed to run to me and announce to others with cheery good will that they now
owned what I had outgrown.
My folks kept up a top-of-the-line,
always-clear-and-cold, built-in pool, sat in fine but foreign and uncomfortable Danish
Modern furniture under perfectly tuned air conditioning, maintained a manicured lawn with grass
so unbendably strong that "blades" took on a whole ‘nuther meaning, and enjoyed the ultimate in
top-grade televisions, turntables, recording devices, speakers, and varied musical instruments; the DeWitts had a
gigantic sandbox with playground swings, trees grown for climbing, and soft,
green, trampled grass, windows thrown open to the breeze, furniture that had
seen more than its share of bottoms, bare feet, and full-length bodies, and a
record player and upright piano that turned any music into a scratchy distortion of sound. The
children lived two- and three-to-a-cubicle (the bedrooms were 8 x 9) with all the mayhem
that suggests; I had my own room, clean, clear, with blue-lavender paint and
thick royal violet carpet, and when the sun was just right shining into the room, a blue-lavender
aura spilled spectacularly into the hall.
But here's where I felt the biggest difference: The
DeWitts had God, living and loving and disciplining, right under their roof; my
mom grew up in a church and thought nice people should go, and my dad felt he
had outgrown the need for church, not to mention God. So the DeWitts had
Bibles. And they read them. And they memorized them. And they bought one
for me, a Scofield reference Bible (far more expensive than my folks would have
allowed, had they only realized): One year for Paula, the oldest, for
Christmas; one year for Donna, a year older than me; the next for Danny, my
age; then David, two years younger; then Sandi, the baby; and the next year, my
own -- leather-bound, filled by crisp tissue-y paper with fine gilt edges, with my very
own name gold-embossed in Script on the front.
I think I'd managed to attend Sunday School and church
with the DeWitts for half-a-dozen years without memorizing anything (including the travel route) except
John 3:16. I didn't know the order of the
Books of the Bible. What I knew about Abraham, Moses, Noah, Daniel, David, and
even Jesus, I came about by the songs we sang and the flannel-board lessons we
endured in Sunday School.
But after paging through my leather-bound Scofield Reference
Bible a few times (the leaflet said that's how you "broke in" the spine, by
going page by page and gently pressing down the page in the middle), I thought perhaps I
should read something in it. One Sunday early
in the New Year, I had cause to talk intellectually to the teacher, for the
first time, about The Bible.
"I don't get it," I said.
For one thing, every church sermon I'd ever heard was about how good God
was (and how easily He could get ticked off), how horrible the death on the
Cross was (but just you wait, if you don't believe), and how if you're feeling
good about life, most likely you don't get the big picture. I had begun reading, as directed, with the
Book of John -- "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and
the Word was God."
Trust me, there had been no flannelboard lesson on that.
In that day, if you read The Bible, you were probably
reading The King James Version. The Catholics, pre-Vatican II, were actively
discouraged from reading Scripture, for just this reason: To understand the
Bible, it took somebody smarter than a 12-year-old to explain it. For Protestant
active-but-non-scholarly readers, there was no Living Bible, no Revised
Standard Version, no American Heritage, no Quest, no Harper's Study Bible, no
Thompson's Chain Reference -- but, as the old story goes, if The King James
Version was good enough for Jesus, it was good enough for me.
I was advised to read the word, or the sentence, the verse,
the chapter, the book, again, and again, if I wanted to understand. To read the
whole Bible, if I still didn't get it. To read the whole Bible clear through,
again, if I was uncertain. And to keep
reading it until bits and pieces stuck inside me, turning up unexpectedly to
guide me when I couldn't tell right from wrong, becoming tried-and-true words to pray
when I was so desolate that original prayer escaped me, to keep reading until the "thee" and "thou"
and verbs with "--est" and "-eth" rested so comfortably inside me that it was second-nature
language.
After that, my summer reading list always included
finishing up the Bible for the year. I read other things, of course -- another difference between the
DeWitts and my folks was that they
allowed comic books (Donna sterilized them by inking over every "darn" and "golly"
as disguised Bad Words), and frankly, my world of words and sense of humor would
be less if I hadn't met Pogo, Charlie Brown, and Barney Google and Snuffy Smith.
I know the arguments about the validity of The Bible; I
took both Christian-centered and humanist classes in The Bible, many in the late
60s within the God is Dead movement. I
understand further the difficulty in translating words across cultures and eras.
But when the Byrds sing, "Turn, turn, turn", I know more
than just the refrain.
"I think,
therefore I am" was not a foreign concept: "Whatsoever a man thinketh in his
heart," that's what he is.
Why bad things happen to good people? Already knew: "The rain falleth on the just
and the unjust."
The fall of the Roman Empire, the fall of the Third Reich, "Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely" were already
inside me like a functioning organ, based on the history of Saul, and David,
and Solomon, and the kings and queens of Israel and Judah to follow.
How is it that abuse begets abuse, that a victim of
sexual offences is not unlikely to become an offender? Because "The sins of the
fathers shall be visited on the son, even unto the seventh generation."
Then why don't we all just give up? Because "The LORD is
merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and plenteous in mercy... He hath not dealt
with us after our sins; nor rewarded us according to our iniquities. For as the
heaven is high above the earth, so great is his mercy toward them that fear him...
Like as a father pitieth his children, so the LORD pitieth them that fear him:
For he knoweth our frame; he remembereth that we are dust."
The less obvious things I learned about Bible scholarship
led me to the head of the class long before research became Google-easy: to
follow a chain of key words... to read the footnotes... that hunting for a topic in
the Index assured more success than searching the Table of Contents... the power
of a parable... to read a section over and over again and search for understanding
rather than shrug through it once and move on because it was tough to digest.
I was able to approach 16th century literature
with much more confidence than my peers, because I already spoke the English of
King James. I understood the "Achilles
Heel" in Greek studies, because I knew about Eve as a follower, Moses's anger
management issues, Goliath as a stereotypical jock, and Esau as the penultimate endomorphic Hemingway man.
I even knew, before the Six-Day War, why the Jews and the Muslims couldn't
get along, because I knew their progenitors, Sarai and Hagar.
As my summer reading grew to include the next school year's
curriculum for fiction and book reports, much of what I read lay upon a mental template
of The Bible. Of Mice and Men did not
trouble me as much as others: I knew the concept of helping a colleague fall on
their sword so the enemy could not do worse.
I understood how Silas Marner could lose everything and could feel more
blessed by what came after; I'd labored with Job.
And I understood Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, through and
throughout, even that bizarre chapter that reads only, "My mother is a fish." Because, after summers of "Finish the Bible"
on my reading list, again and again, I knew how the family next door could be more than family to me, and I knew how God could be a Word.