I visited Monroeville, once. In the summer of 1990, I, my husband and a friend were driving home from the beach when one of us spied the interstate exit that leads to the home of Harper Lee. My friend had (finally) read To Kill a Mockingbird, she was still overwhelmed by the power of the story and she wanted to see Miss Lee’s home town. My husband knows how much I care about the book and he thought it would be a treat, so he steered us onto the highway. Once we hit the center of town, the two of them started plying me with questions so they could pick out landmarks from the novel. How far was the Finch house from the school? Was the Radley house on the same or opposite side of the street? My husband suggested (I think he was joking) that, with a bit of research, we’d be able to locate Miss Lee’s new address and he would take us to her door. I began to feel very uncomfortable. Not only do I get tongue tied around famous authors, (I displayed something like Tourette’s syndrome in front of Dr. Seuss) I couldn’t get past the…
Kids take a lot of things for granted. It’s part of being a kid, to accept the world and its people as part of how life should be. That’s a terrible thing for kids who live with pain or deprivation but for a lot of us that meant a childhood where we took bicycles, birthday parties, vacations and our family’s love and devotion as part of our just due. We rarely said thank you. For example, I never thanked my folks for showing me why some stories are classics. Still, I haven’t forgotten our time with Treasure Island. I don’t know if Treasure Island is still one of the required books of childhood. There are so many other stories now and Disney has such an imprimatur on the pirate world these days that Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic may get lost in the shuffle. My folks had both grown up with the tale and I suspect they were a bit excited about sharing “their” story with me when I turned ten. Perhaps I was a bit young, but I already had my nose in a book all the time so why not give me one they loved? None of us expected…