#4 An Important Book

What book made the biggest impact on your life?

My first impression of this question was...yikes, I read all the time. How in the world can I pick one book that was the most important to me? That's a near impossible task! Yet when I actually sat down to write this, it became very simple. It would have to be a book I read over and over again as a child. It would have to be the one that instilled in me the love of reading for shear pleasure and enjoyment. The one where the words just danced off the page and made me smile. The one that called to me every night...pick me up...read me aloud..listen....there is magic on the page...

Christmas morning 1961, my parents gave me a small book of poetry called Silver Pennies by Blanche Jennings Thomson. She was the head of the English Department at Benjamin Franklin High School in Rochester, New York and she edited this anthology in April, 1925. It was illustrated in black and white by Winifred Bromhall. Nothing fancy here, just a gathering of absolutely wonderful poems.

Thomson wrote in her Preface, "You must have a silver penny to get into fairyland. But silver pennies are hard to find and it isn't everyone who knows where to look for them, even if he has time: so it is for such people, the mothers and the teachers who want silver pennies for their children that this volume is prepared. It is my hope that no child will be left out of the fairyland of modern poetry for the lack of a silver penny."

It is here I discovered Vachel Lindsay, Sara Teasdale, Hilda Conkling, Robert Frost, Walter de la Mare, and Edna St. Vincent Milay. I read about the moon and the stars, fairies, dancing potatoes, griffins, cats, camels, elves and Joan of Arc. Everyday things became magical and the magical became real. My imagination soared as the words took me on faraway journeys or caused me to look at things in a slightly different way. This book sat beside my bed and I read from it daily. Where is this little book now? On a shelf in my office, still close at hand.

Here is one of my favorites. Doesn't it sound just like me?

I Meant to do My Work Today

I meant to do my work today-

But a brown bird sang in the apple tree,

And a butterfly flitted across the field,

And all the leaves were calling to me.

And the wind went sighing over the land,

Tossing the grasses to and fro,

And a rainbow held out it's shining hand-

So what could I do but laugh and go?

Richard Le Gallienne