A great story teller

My mother had a terrible time getting me to read. I remember those terrible little readers from the fifties with cheesy little pictures of chubby children with blond curls and long eye lashes. I don't know why we owned so many of them but I was always dreading having o read out of the next one. There were long hours of me sounding out words so slowly that they lost all meaning in the sentence but it didn't matter cause the sentences were so dull. I always felt cheated when I finally got all the words right and we went over them again to put the sentence together and all we got was "Sally plays with her doll." I've always been such a slow learner.

But I've always loved books, just not reading them. Mom and Dana read to me. We got through quite a pile of children's literature before I could read anything like that for myself. Some of those books came and went without much notice and some I have reread dozens of times. One unforgettable story was about a cat who belonged to a Wizard. Ever since the Wizard gave the cat the gift of speech there was nothing the cat wanted more than to be a human. When the Wizard finally granted his wish a crazy and hilarious adventure followed. The book was The Cat Who Wished to be a Man by Lloyd Alexander.

Several years later Lloyd Alexander's stories (with some help from Redwall) were the irresistible sirens that made me a reader forever. I was about twelve. I got The Book of Three on tape read by the author and got hooked. But those little cassette tapes (such a thing of the past now) were easily corrupted and about half way through the story the voice stared echoing and fading in and out and as hard as I tried there came a point where I couldn't understand him anymore. So I had to get the book out and actually read it. Then there were the other four books in the Prydain Chronicles and the dozens of other miscellaneous books about everything from unemployed violinists to recently displaced bean counters. The Gowgan and the Boy, The Iron Ring, The Marvelous Misadventures of Sebastian, The Arcadians, Time Cat, Gypsy Riska... the list goes on. The characters had real voices and faces and funny little quirks. Admittedly, there were character types that got reused in almost every book, and there were plot twists that I cam to expect in each story. But every book began with a sentence or two that made it impossible to leave the book at the library. There were messages about honor and sacrifice and love and humility and the value of life. One of them is almost singlehandedly responsible for getting me re-interested in history and introducing me to Longfellow ( if in a rather backward way) There was one trilogy that I didn't like because the questions it asked about war and violence bothered me. He didn't seem to have very good answers. But maybe that was the point. There are not good answers about somethings. It was probably just a little too big for me. I will have to read it again someday. I finished every one of them with the conviction that it was the best one he'd ever written... and then I'd open the next one.... I have not read all of them because my new found love of stories soon took me to other corners of the library but the ones I did read stayed with me. He was a huge part of my life!



I found out today that Lloyd Alexander died last summer!

And no one told me!!! Today is his birthday. That kind of freaks me out; I found out he's dead on his birthday. It totally ruined my day.

I would finish a Lloyd Alexander book and read the inside jacket panel about how Mr. Alexander lived with his wife and his cats on Drexel Hill Pennsylvania. I wanted to go there and meet him. Since that seemed highly unlikely I would say a prayer for him or offer mass for him in hopes that I would get to meet him in heaven. I don't know anything about his faith or lack there of, but I was determined. Now I guess I have to work on getting there myself.≈