I remember the first time I got in trouble in school.
At least, the first time I remember.
It was in first grade and I got caught stealing reading books from the sixth grade end of the school. You’d think someone would have head-smacked themselves and said “Hey, this 6-year-old is reading books meant for 12-year-olds –maybe we need to challenge her some more.”
But no. What they said was mor along the lines of “No recess,” which meant I was stuck inside, forced to read “See Jane run” when I had just been getting into “Once there were four children whose names were Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy. This story is about something that happened to them when they were sent away from London during the war because of the air-raids ” from The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.
But like many things I’ve bitched and moaned about in my life, this gross injustice worked out well for me in the long run. First of all, not being the running and jumping sort of girl (Unless I was on a horse that was doing the running and jumping for me,) recess was a gauntlet of terror and anger. A tomboy, even at the tender age of 6, I never fit in the girly-girl groups, who, even at at the tender age of 6. were perfecting the art of character assassination and fashion policing. The boys didn’t want me hanging around because, well, I was a girl. Ew.
It could have been a lonely childhood until I got my horse (horses are great friends. They have to listen and they keep their mouths shut) but I had my books. I had worlds to visit and heroes to meet, and when The Man (meaning Mrs. Gilliam, whom I remember as being 106 but was probably closer to 40) denied me access to the wonderful stories at the sixth-grade end, of Bel-Aire, I wrote my own. So in a roundabout way, I guess I have to giver her credit for turning me into a writer.
It wasn’t until 4th grade, the same year I got my first horse, that I was able to revisit Narnia. Until then, our stories had been about real-life boys and girls, figures in history, or the like. Mythology was the closest thing to fantasy we read and I didn’t even realize there was such a thing as fantasy or science fiction out there.
The day I read the chapter where Lucy meets the faun Tumnus, the only part of the book in our reader, my oldest brother Mike came home to visit. Twelve years older, Mike was always more of an eccentric uncle than a brother. About the time I became aware of his existence, he was off to college, where he promptly dropped out and joined the hippie generation, which he never truly abandoned.
I told him about the story and was dumbfounded to find out it was part of its own book — and there were six more books in the series!
For Christmas that year, I got a boxed set of paperbacks — a Puffin set of the Narnia Chronicles that Mike had gotten by sneaking across the Canadian border because ti wasn’t available in the US at that time.
I devoured the books — and I still re-read them every year. They not only opened up whole new worlds for me in the realms of literature, they introduced me to my big brother and established the foundtion of our relationship which only grew stronger and stronger until the day he died.
Mike led me to Pern, where I came to ride dragons, and he guided me to Mordor so I could drop the One Ring into the fires of Mount Doom. Other planets, other dimensions, other possibilities unfolded in front of me and the gateway was that wardrobe in the spare room.
Sometimes, though, I wonder if he did me any favors with that gift. The problem with fantasy is that, well, it isn’t real. It’s tempting to ignore the problems of real life by hiding on Dune or fighting evil in Prydain.
Remember all the uproar when the Harry Potter books came out, and the Religious (not) Right (in the head) called them textbooks to Satanism? I talked it over with Scott, my oldest. Getting him to read had been a painful chore until Harry Potter, which he dove into head first and came up smiling, Since then, he’s gone on to read everything from calculus textbooks (for fun!) and “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.”
He pointed out to me that anyone smart enough to actually read the books is smart enough to grasp the concept that they are fiction. Broomsticks don’t really fly.
“What the book is really about is friendship,” he said. “They help each other.”
He was right, of course. And looking back at all of those fantasy books, under the sparkle of unicorns , dragons and magic wands are simply stories of how people handle problems, and in the best stories, it’s not the magic that saves them so much as how they use it.
So here I am, 360 days away from being 50 and in a bad place. Out of work, living on the charity of family, broke and blue, the temptation to give myself over to fantasy is overwhelming. But I’m going to take a page from that first-grade lesson.
If I don’t like the story I’m being forced to read — I’ll just write my own.
Figuratively and literally.
marymothermayhem 