June 15, 2007

• Paying It Forward

  Hi, everybody.

  Since moving home after my last year of university, I've been pretty
  much blissed out in my husband's perennial garden, which is blooming
  like mad right now. I swear there are more blushing pink blooms on the
  Stanwell Perpetual than there is foliage. Can it be seen from space?!

  However, today I thought I'd write about a gift I gave recently that
  meant a great deal to me. There's a backstory to it, and here it is:

  I was eight years old when my parents finally saved enough money to buy
  their own home. We were to move in the summer, only a few miles, but it
  might as well have been across the country, in my opinion. I went
  around saying goodbye to everything I knew.

  Sadly, I don't remember very much about my next-door neighbours, the
  Cuttresses, except that they were elderly and nice to me. They always
  said hello over the hedge. One day, just before our move, Mr. Cuttress
  came over with a small green book in his hands. He told me that he
  thought I might enjoy this book one day when I was older. I thanked him
  and regarded it as a pretty serious gift. It was called Palgrave's Golden Treasury, and was the first "adult" object I was ever given.

  I asked my father to read it to me at bedtime. I read it over myself
  very often, even when I was too young to understand much of it.
  Rhythms, rhymes, and images filtered into my subconscious, it seems. I
  now know that the Treasury is
  considered a significant anthology of poetry in English, containing the
  best of the best from Shakespeare to Shelley to Tennyson. I believe
  that this book made a big difference in my life, in the way that I see
  the English language and its literature, and in my love for poetry. I
  am well aware of all the arguments nowadays about the traditonal
  literary "canon" -- what is the "best" writing? who gets to decide? --
  but Frances Turner Palgrave knew what he was about, and his choices
  remain dear to me today.

  When I was a few years older, I decided that one day, I would give a copy of the Treasury
  to another little girl when I grew up. At first, I thought that it
  might be my own daughter, but since I didn't have children, I hoped
  there would be someone else in my family or among my friends to whom I
  could give this book. No one appeared until one day a couple of months
  ago when a friend from university brought along her nice
  eleven-year-old daughter to a dinner date one Friday afternoon. I felt
  right away that this was my chance to extend Mr. Cuttress's
  thoughtfulness.

  I couldn't give away my own copy of the Treasury,
  so I went out on the Web and found a beautiful one (illustrated here).
  I tried not to make a big deal about the gift, even though I was so
  excited about it, because I'd like her to read it with a sense of
  delight rather than out of duty. In any case, I feel elated that I was
  able to enact, 35 years later, my old neighbour's kindness to me, and
  make it my kindness to Jenna.

  That gift also taught me another important thing about kids: They are
  capable of stretching and should be given opportunities to reach for
  what they can't quite grasp yet. Experiences needn't always be geared
  precisely to the age of a child; I benefited in so many ways from
  receiving this very grown-up book!

  • 1:36 am
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