Night Fantasies and Other Reading Pleasures
In response to The Daily Post’s writing prompt: “Bedtime Stories.” What was your favorite book as a child? Did it influence the person you are now?
For his entire life, my dad was the storyteller in the house, but at night time, it was my mom who climbed into bed with me and talked me to sleep. At first, she would make up the stories, perhaps fitting me into them, or weaving fantastic tales of everyday life that grew as I asked question after question. (Present day bloggers may notice this same tendency in my comments! Sound familiar, “Relax”?)
One story would end, and of course, I demanded another. Finally, she found a book of one-page stories to read to me, and when she got to the end of the first page, most nights she could be prevailed upon to read one or two more. To this day, I usually listen to a recorded book from Audible as I fall asleep. As I’ve noted before, sometimes I wake up in the morning with the book still running and I wonder how it affects my dreams.
What a relief to learn to read in the first grade, so I could experience a new story whenever I wished. From Dick and Jane to The Little Red Hen, I loved those simple plots that somehow grew so involved in my imagination.
Many of my favorite childhood books were lost in a tornado, but a few years ago, I found a number of others in my older sister’s library. “A Walk in the City,” several Dr. Seuss books and my favorite of all times, “The Teenie Weenies” now reside on my own bookshelves.
It was in second or third grade that I became addicted to Nancy Drew. Go HERE for that story.
lifelessons - a blog by Judy Dykstra-Brown 
A reflection across time. Thank you.
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One of my favorite books was also a “A Walk in the City”. I still have that book! Also, a favorite book to read to my boys was “A Fly Went By” and “the Little house” “Fernand the Bull” and all time favorite, “The Story of Ping” I also had and still have several picture books illustrated by Aurthor Rickham. Look him up. I would sit and look for hours at his illustrations. Thanks for taking me back down memory lane!
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I can’t believe there was another person who read that book. It was orange, right? I may have it in a box somewhere. Otherwise, I want to come see yours. That is just too big of a coincidence!!!!
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I think I must have been the only girl I knew who wasn’t addicted to Nancy Drew. For me, if there was no horse or dog in it, it wasn’t worth reading. I was very animal-centric 🙂
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I can make out that you were a curious kid and so nice of your mother to read you a story one after another. ” A walk in the city” is my favorite too and my sons also loved this book.
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Unbelievable that I have found two people who know that obscure book!!
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Well, the pleasures of stories told. We used to buy storybooks and beg our mother to read them to us. She would take time off from her chores and join us, while we tried to cajole her to read more and many more. The beautiful illustrations of those books still evoke her involvement and love.
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That’s really tragic that you lost most of your books in a tornado. Where did you live then?
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Murdo, South Dakota. I found out many years later that a friend took some of them before they knocked down the building and my sister had evidently taken others earlier. My friend said her children grew up reading the books. I’ve lived so many places since then I would have lost them by now anyway…I also remember one called “The Pokey Little Puppy” and another about a piggy bank that was left on the shelf of a store with dozens of other duplicat piggy banks but that finally got chosen. What strange books we had…ha. But, I loved them. My uncle was Supt. of schools in another state and he’d send us boxes of books that had been sent to him by publishers to consider for use in the schools. We were in a tiny town that didn’t have a library so they were like treasures.
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Oh I remember so well (now that you have reminded me) McGulligot’s Pool. But my earliest favorite was “To Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street” also by Dr. Suess. I also loved Robert Louis Stevenson’s Child’s Garden of Verses. the lines of the poem about the little boy playing with his soldiers in bed still tickle my mind as I drive home from Guadalajara.
Kids and Books….what a combo…My daughter checked out a book from the library the librarian offered to order it for me, at her discount, so Sus could have her own copy.
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Saturday Evening Post and Redbook used to publish his poems and books and we couldn’t wait for the next one. One of my favorites was The Zode in the Road. I had just the last line, but managed to locate it and I’m going to put it in my blog tomorrow…Good advice as usual from the Dr. (My dad’s favorite was Yertle the Turtle. He was the one who would read them to us, over and over. )
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Judy we have so many parallel thoughts it scares me. I say this as a fact, not a come on, so I do try not to say it. This morning I wrote a long drivel and in it I was talking about the very same thing you talk about above.
I have been deaf sense I was three years old (measles), and due to this my main past time was reading. I could hear a little, but even today I miss a lot of words, so avoid crowds, as words sometime run together when two people are talking at once. So I would spend a lot of my summers alone in a library reading and when I was ten years old I got an award for having read every book in the kid’s section of the Napoleon library in New Orleans. Several of the books you mention, I not only read but remember passages in them and remember full poems as well, I can still recite the full of Mark Anthony’s soliloquy. This is not a superior knowledge, but rather another advantage that a deaf person has, just as a blind person can walk through a room and not bump into things, through memory.
Thanks to operations and hearing aids I am much better today, but as a kid, this put me into a dream world at times, memorizing poetry and sections of a book almost with a single reading.
As to my kids, I thought that it would be neat to just tell them about my past experiences in the many places I have worked. As you may know, they are at times, almost unbelievable. This went on for several nights until one night my oldest, who was about seven at the time, said: Oh Dad not those old stories again~! What a let down~! So I went back to reading to them from the “Lucky Luke books” which are in French, with me then explaining each page to them in English. This helped to teach them the language and actually it was a learning experience to me too, as those stories have a lot of colloquial expressions in them that the average person would not know.
Better stop, must go pick my car up from the shop and that is not an easy task due to the virus rules.
I hope you get to read the special poem I wrote for you this morning to you, even if you may not agree…
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