I was a bit too enervated to worry about blogging, or reading blogs, last night, so I woke this morning to find the entire Internet plastered with the news that Madeleine L’Engle had died. (See link list below).
I know exactly when I read my first L’Engle book: it was A Wrinkle In Time, in the enrichment program in Grade 3. I think that means I was 9 years old. I remember the book completely blowing me away. Like some other people, I wanted to be Charles Wallace so bad that it hurt. I may also have wanted some Meg qualities as well. More than that though, it was the combination of the scientific with the fantastical. It was witches explaining that the while the shorted distance between two places is a straight line that using an extra dimension meant you could cheat about where the line went.
It wasn’t my first genre book–I’m sure that I had already explored the Secret World of Og, and been on The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet–but it was the first one that I felt “treated me as an adult”. It was the first one that really sunk the hook deep, and is probably at least partly responsible for my lifelong fascination with fantasy and science fiction.
I did go on to read A Wind In The Door (certainly the first time I had heard of mitochondria), and A Swiftly Tilting Planet, which was the end of the series at the time. I’ve been contemplating reading the rest of her works, including the O’Keefe stuff recently–while I’ve been hanging out at the children’s bookstore with Sarah I’ve noticed the other books and they call out to me. I’m actually quite excited about eventually being able to read A Wrinkle In Time with Sarah.
My favourite story about that whole Grade Three experience though has to do with my Dad. I was so excited about some of the ideas in the book that I kept talking about it at dinner. In retrospect, this was probably a torrent of the kind of stream-of-consciousness raving you might expect from an excited and geeky kid. Somehow, for some reason, my Dad ended up saying something that I interpreted as being a criticism of the book–something along the “it can’t be all that if you’re reading it in Grade 3” line–and my response was to challenge him to read the book. To my knowledge my father never read a fiction book during my lifetime, so I’m sure I was pretty obnoxious about it. Anyway, we ended up with a $10 bet that he wouldn’t be able to finish (or possibly “to understand”) the book.
A couple of weeks later when he gave up on the book–I remember it as him saying it “didn’t make sense”, but he might have just decided he didn’t have the time or inclination to pursue it–the memory of a nine year old are suspect.
It was the sweetest $10 I ever spent.
So, here’s a toast to L’Engle, on behalf of that excited nine-year old, and in thanks for her part in setting me on my path. Some of the glory of the world has passed on this week.
A few of the places I saw the news today (there were a lot more):
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