Literature adds to reality, it does not simply describe it. It enriches the necessary competencies that daily life requires and provides; and in this respect, it irrigates the deserts that our lives have already become. ~C.S. Lewis
Currently we are in the latter half of a book called A Christmas Memory by Truman Capote with Beck Peck's exquisite pen and watercolor illustrations. It has a rating of being at the 5.7 grade level, although I think it is a bit low compared to other fifth grade level books. It had first been published as a short story in Mademoiselle magazine in December, 1956 and again reprinted in The Selected Writings of Truman Capote in 1963 before Random House issued the book in 1966. You might know Capote's more famous works, Breakfast at Tiffany's and In Cold Blood. Based on his own boyhood in rural Alabama in the 1930's, this story portrays a vivid rendering of life during the Great Depression and Prohibition. Capote had been abandoned by his mother as a child and lived with distant cousins. His favorite cousin, Miss Sook Faulk inspired him with her eccentricities and childlike innocence, influences notable in many of his short stories.
I cannot recommend this book without a warning, because his sixty-something-year-old cousin, who is the boy's best friend, and the boy take a daytime walk to what was probably a speakeasy far back in the woods near a river to buy one bottle of whiskey for $2.00 and then she gives a bit of the remaining from baking her fruit cakes to him; he is only seven years old—undoubtedly something that most Christians parents would rather avoid reading in a child's book, even if it has some historical significance.
Even so, it is a joy to read:
Frozen rime lusters on the grass; the sun, round as an orange and orange as hot-weather moons, balances on the horizon, burnishes the silvered woods. A wild turkey calls. A renegade hog grunts in the undergrowth. Soon, by the edge of knee-deep, rapid running water, we have to abandon the buggy. Queenie wades the stream first, paddles across barking complaints of the swiftness of the current, the pneumonia-making coldness of it. We follow, holding our shoes and equipment (a hatchet, a burlap sack) above our heads. A mile more: of chastising thorns, burs and briers that catch our clothes; of rusty pine needles brilliant with gaudy fungus and molted feathers. Here, there, a flash, a flutter, and ecstasy of shillings remind us that not all the birds have flown south. Always, the path unwinds through lemony sun pools and pitch-black vine tunnels. Another creek to cross; a disturbed armada of speckled trout froths the water round us, and frogs the size of plates practice belly flops; beaver workmen are building a dam. On the farther shore, Queenie shakes herself and trembles. My friend shivers, too: not with cold but enthusiasm. One of her hat's ragged roses sheds a petal as she lifts her head and inhales the pine heavy air. "We're almost there; can you smell it, Buddy?" she says, as though we were approaching an ocean.
And, indeed, it is a kind of ocean. Scented acres of holiday trees, prickly leafed holly. Red berries shiny as Chinese bells: black crows swoop upon them screaming. Having stuffed our burlap sacks with enough greenery and crimson to garland a dozen windows, we set about choosing a tree. "It should be," muses my friend, "twice as tall as a boy. So a boy can't steal the star." The one we pick is twice as tall as me. A brave handsome brute that survives thirty hatchet strokes before it keels with a creaking rending cry. Lugging it like a kill, we commence the long trek out. Every few yards we abandon the struggle, sit down and pant. But we had the strength of triumphant huntsmen; that and the tree's virile, icy perfume revive us, goad us on.
The words washed over us both; I indulged in a soaking bath while my daughter barely dipped her toes. I reread portions and we search definitions in our dictionaries—to be honest, some of the writer's words were not listed in even my better dictionary. Quite titillating! A taste of real literature. My daughter's perspective on Christmas trees may never be quite the same. It is with much anticipation that I look forward to my daughter's graduation from the customary jargon of children's books.
~ My Lord, thank you for providing us with such talented people, who can express the ordinary in such a way that it changes our perspective and enriches our own ordinary lives. ~
