Hiking Out: childhood

Showing posts with label childhood. Show all posts

Neil Gaiman Writes for Homebound Winter Days

Book: The Ocean at the End of the Lane
Author: Neil Gaiman

This is a book to own and to wrap your hands around and to feel how the letters are embossed on the book jacket after you have read the last page and need to hold on to the characters and their tale. This story transcends genre; it is the definition of story.

A story that brings out the child in all of us, or at least our memory of childhood.

Make no mistake, it's not lighthearted. It is the stuff of nightmares. As Maurice Sendak is quoted in the epigraph, "I remember my childhood vividly... I knew terrible things. But I knew I mustn't let adults know I knew. It would scare them." Neil Gaiman deftly transported me into my own childhood memories.

Some of the images (no spoilers) of childhood thoughts that rang so true...

The main character, a young boy, discovers a hole in his foot, "I do not know why I didn't ask an adult about it. I do not remember asking adults about anything, except as a last resort."

In the recounting of his tale that is the stuff of dreams and nightmares, the narrator says, "Why do I find the hardest thing for me to believe, looking back, is that a girl of 5 and a boy of 7 had a gas fire in their bedroom?"

Describing a black and white TV, "The vertical hold was unreliable, and the fuzzy black-and-white picture had a tendency to stream, in a slow ribbon: people's heads vanished off the bottom of the screen as their feet descended, in a stately fashion, from the top."

"Peas baffled me. I could not understand why grown-ups would take things that tasted so good when they were freshly-picked and raw, and put them in tin cans, and make them revolting."

"Adults should not weep, I knew. They did not have mothers who would comfort them."

I took a journey with these characters and was left wanting more, but knowing that more could easily spoil the gift I had been given by an incredibly talented author.

As the snow builds up outside, curl up with a book and find your childhood.

In a word: Relationships

A word cloud formed from blogs on the value of overnight camp for campers and counselors conveys the essence of camp, and perhaps, of life : relationships.

Relationships with friends and campers and counselors, and yes with parents too.

Relationships with counselors who live in the moment and serve as valuable role models for children.

Relationships among campers who learn and grow to meet their potential, who arrive with trepidation and leave camp with memories and lives changed through the relationships they form each summer.

Relationships between children and parents who give the gift of summer camp knowing a child can gain more self-confidence and responsibility in a few weeks of summer fun than nearly anywhere else in life.

Look into an overnight summer camp experience for your child this year.

For more blogs on camp visit: Summer Camp

Newspaper Nostalgia

The Sunday New York Times was not a ride and toss delivery route when I was a kid. My dad drove me around in our station wagon and I got out at each house and carried the paper up each walkway, opened each screen door and carefully nestled the paper against each front door as I quietly closed the screen. The transition to adult paper deliverers aside, a child’s paper route is left to nostalgia as we pull out our iPads to read the morning news.

My husband is reading the New York Times. I don’t hear the crinkle of paper as he flips the page though—he has been reading the Times on his iPad for over a year now. It’s like having a newspaper press next to our bed without all of the cacophony of machinery. And we get the late, late edition—the ones only New Yorkers used to be able to get by stepping out in the cool night air and walking around the corner to their newsstand.

When I read a story on the iPad the headline stays consistent from the start to the end of the article—no need to flip to an interior page and hunt for the altered headline the editor deemed necessary to create. Color photos are far more numerous than in the print edition and unless the printed paper has come direct from Hogwarts, it doesn’t have any of the videos I find in my iPad version. I have never wanted to post a comment on an article, but having the opportunity is cool.

Yet I miss using the well-taught lessons on how to properly share a newspaper that I learned at a very young age from my dad. We had a pecking order on who could read which section when. My dad got first choice of sections, mom second, older siblings next and eventually the comics in our local paper worked their way into my hands. Equally importantly, I learned how to refold my section and place it neatly upon the pile of sections from the Sunday paper stacked by my dad’s living room chair.

I miss the heft of the Sunday New York Times and the nesting of its sections. I miss watching my dad flip through each paper to ensure all sections were present. I wonder what new newspaper etiquette will be passed on to the next generation as they read the morning news on lazy Sunday mornings.