The Istoriaphile’s Corner

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…