Today, I’m posting a piece I wrote a while back.  I’m pretty sure it was for a children’s writing contest entitled, “What it Means to Have a Book Available in Another Culture or Language.”  Our essays had to speak to that question.  Mine really only spoke to culture, which is one of the reasons it didn’t win.  That’s my guess anyway.  [Or they deemed it shabbily written!]

Here it is.  See if you can guess the titles of the books mentioned.

Growing up among politely aloof, staunch Lutheran Scandinavians, I hear Ole and Sven and Lena jokes, grin at lutefisk horror stories, eat krumkake cookies for Christmas, and devour fruit hovering in Jello.

How do I know this is not how every child lives?

Because I read.  I read to know my experience is unique.

And universal.

I read to know I’m normal.  I read to know I’m not alone.

The books I read are like magic carpets which whisk me far, far away into other lands and other cultures where other boys and girls do not eat lutefisk with mashed potatoes or krumkake cookies with cream.

I swim along the Yangtze River with the duck Ping and see houseboats and trained fishing birds with collars around their necks.  I am afraid, as he is, of getting a whack on the behind for straying.

At Purim, I rattle a grager with the girls in All of a Kind Family when Haman’s name is read from the scroll of Esther.  I hate the villain Haman with unabated passion.

I cry when Anne Frank writes in her diary Kitty about the meager, bad food her family eats and how they fear discovery by the Nazis.  I know fear.  And my ravenous stomach cannot fathom a pittance of food.

I laugh and am glad for my three-syllable name when Tikki tikki tembo-no sa rembo-chari bari ruchi-pip peri pembo falls into the well, and the Old Man with the Ladder rescues him.

I, along with Mowgli, am raised by a clan of wolves in the Indian jungle and eat fresh meat from the kill.  I, too, want to rough it and survive with my animal friends.

I am plane-wrecked with a group of English schoolboys on a deserted island and have to gather food, make fire, and build shelter.  I hate Jack, the redheaded prig who becomes a painted savage, and I love Ralph who befriends Piggy.

I fear Boo Radley, just as Scout and Jim, and want to know why the townspeople don’t like Tom Robinson because anybody knows he’s just like us, only black.  I think, like Scout, that people are essentially kind when you get to know them.

I know what it feels like not to fit in, like Kit Tyler in her uncle’s Puritan town of Weathersfield.  I’m afraid when she talks to the old Quaker woman, the Witch of Blackbird Pond, and angry when the hysterical crowds accuse Kit of being a witch.

When Jody Baxter has to kill his pet deer, Flag, my heart constricts, and I know that I, too, have lost someone irreplaceable, someone dear to my heart.

Sara Crewe in Little Princess says dolls are alive, but you just have to catch them at it.  I sneak out of my bedroom where I have my baby dolls lined up.  I peek back in through the doorway, but, no, the dolls are as still as stone.  I’m never fast enough.

These characters are not like me.  They live in dissimilar parts of the world.  Their daily rituals are different from mine.

But, they are like me.  They laugh, cry, hate, love, and fear just like me.

I know, despite our nationalities or our locations or our languages, we are human.  And that is all we need, really.

[Post image: Old Books by nkzs on stock.xchng]