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It was 10:40 on a school night, the
end of the last shift of the day, which had seemed more difficult
than usual: homework and bath time had been laborious and fraught
with resistance, bedtime was now forty five minutes late.
And so I cannot tell you why I and
my sons, Ariel, 11 and Ben, nine, were all in Ben's bed when
I opened The
Secret Garden and began reading aloud.
One of my early fantasies of
motherhood had been to share this childhood favorite with
my own children. But now it was 2000 and I had two boys who
were competent though not avid readers, well entrenched in
the popular cultures of television and computers. They are
boys who spend most of their days playing sports or running
around with other boys. How would they relate to this British
girl living in the 1800's in India?
I began, "When Mary Lennox was
sent to Misselthwaite Manor everyone said she was the most
disagreeable looking child ever seen..."
"Is this going to be a sad story?"
Ben asked.
"Well sad.... and happy,"
I answered and read on.
I finished the chapter in about seven
minutes, with a few stops for explanations. I looked up in amazement
to see the boys' faces awash with sadness.
"You said it wouldn't be sad,"
Ariel said. "Now you have to keep reading. We can't go to sleep
yet."
WHAT MAKES
A CLASSIC A CLASSIC?
Seven minutes. In seven minutes my
sons had been completely drawn in. This, I thought, is what makes
a classic a classic - its ability to endure over time and across
cultures. In this case, it seemed extraordinary considering the
effort it took my children to access the story. There were many
words they didn't know, either because it was written in British
English, or because they are bi-lingual and have an impoverished
vocabulary, or because the book used terms related to the culture
of that place and period.
Seven minutes. Suspense and drama had
ensnared them. Poor little rich Mistress Mary been forgotten in
the flurry of a cholera epidemic, and had awoken to discover that
everyone in the household, including her parents, were dead.
Seven minutes. How long would it take,
I wondered, to achieve that same depth of involvement in a television
show or a movie? Forty-five minutes, I conjectured, might bring
you close to tears.
A SENSE
OF MAGIC
At the same time, this sense of magic
seemed to come not just from the story itself, but the fact that
it was read aloud. I thought about the fact that reading aloud usually
stops when children are old enough to read to themselves. Yet thinking
back on my own childhood, my sister read to me long after I knew
how to read.
Among others she read Louisa
May Alcott's Little
Women and Little
Men in their voluminous entirety. Later, when I got
married, I felt compelled to read aloud some of my favorite
childhood books to my husband, among them: The
Secret Garden, Harriet
the Spy, by Louise Fitzhugh, and To
Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee.
Reading aloud provides a unique space,
in which the one-on-one intimate relationship between narrator
and reader may be shared in a group. The
Secret Garden led to many discussions among the boys
and me along the way. Why were the British in India? What
was it like to travel then? How did people treat children
differently then than they do today? What is a moor? What
was the difference between Indian servants and British servants?
And The
Secret Garden offers genuine pathos. Thus far it is
a dismal tale of an orphan who travels from India to live
with her strange uncle, where she has been given strict orders
to bother no one and to confine herself to two of the hundred
rooms in the dreary mansion. We scorn spoiled Mary and at
the same time we feel dread, fear and anguish together with
her.
We've only gotten to page 30 with all
the background discussions. And there is a good seventy pages till
Mistress Mary peeks over the wall to her wondrous discovery. But
I feel as if my sons and I have been given a rare gift: a rambling
foray into our own secluded sanctum.
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