Friday, April 17, 2009

Goodbye to Bedtime Stories

It’s sad to say, but my kids are too old now and I no longer get to read to them at bedtime. Those sweet sessions have slipped away and they’re never coming back. We’ll have no more weeks together idling through a fat novel, looking forward to each evening’s dose of page-turning suspense; no more trying out our bogus British accents on the droll dialogue of Bertie Wooster and his better half, Jeeves; no more letting that trickster E. B. White sneak up on us with one of life’s tragedies such as the loss of a dear friend. It’s time to say goodbye – and goodnight – to bedtime reading.

Not that I always looked forward to it. There are a few beloved children’s authors who drove me to the edge of censorship. “What? No, I can’t seem to find our copy of The Wee Animals of Wobblyville. Gosh, I guess we’ll have to launch into Tom Sawyer instead. What a shame.”

The kids are still here, of course. They haven’t slipped away yet, they’re still their good old selves, but while you’re not looking the “kid” part rubs off of them a little at a time and you glimpse who they’ve wanted to be their whole lives anyway. The books are still great, too, but we just don’t share them any more in the evening. The rituals of family reading have served their purposes: dipping the children deep in the pleasures of literacy, passing on parts of the culture, and weaving ourselves intricately into each other’s lives. Over the teenage years you have to wait for the young people, you have to hope they’ll come back around. But that’s okay, I’m patient. Some of the best things in life are slow, aren’t they?

Like reading a big thick novel. Slow reading, living in the writer’s imagination and your own for days and days. Floating down the Mississippi on that raft just as aimlessly as Huck and Jim did, seeing their precious lives unfold and spread themselves against the beautiful, stark river and the shocking fabric of human society. Hearing the poor unschooled boy weigh the deal adults wanted him to make, to sell out his friend because of the color of his skin, and hearing him say no, no matter how much he might later have to pay.

And for the reader, there are all those pages salted with the N-word, used casually and endlessly the way people did back then. You feel the weight of crude racism, chapter by chapter – how relentless and thoughtless and malevolent it was. That’s the beautiful intensity that literature offers, a focused experience of life in art.

But now I must take my leave of reading all those lovely books aloud at bedtime. It’s time to say goodbye – goodnight, really…

Goodnight, Huck and Jim, goodnight, Charlotte,
Goodnight, red-haired Anne who dreams of puffy sleeves,
Goodnight, Atticus, goodnight, Boo Radley,
Goodnight, Wooster, and goodnight, Jeeves,
Goodnight, Hermione, goodnight, Harry,
Goodnight, Scrooge and the lessons you learn,
Goodnight, pages, goodnight, books,
Goodnight, you children who will never return.

Broadcast by Ken Smith on April 17, 2009
Books & Films • Customs & Rituals • Family & Friends • Permalink • Printer Friendly
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