Editor’s note: During Family Literacy Week last month, The Morning Star asked for families to submit a short story about how they reduce screen time for their children and activities they do together. Vernon resident Jim Bodkin shared the following story about introducing his daughter Alicyn to the joys of reading.
Your article about sharing a love of books sent me, at age three score and 10, into a nostalgia trip of the reading pleasures I shared with my daughter, Alicyn, long before this electronic gizmo age of today was ever dreamed of.
Sure enough, checking old photo albums turned up many pictures, long ignored, that provoked a wallowing sentimentality. Yes, tears of joy do exist! Yes, ‘tis true…remembrance of things long past does make the heart grow fonder!
I dug up two photos from Christmas 1976 when Alicyn had just turned five. In one she’s beaming at receiving a storybook from her Great-Grandma Bodkin and the other shows her (with a spaced out Daddy I barely recognize) smiling at a gift of a Peanuts colouring book in one hand and a box of crayons in the other.
Other photos taken on our homemade pontoon houseboat during the summer of 1976 show Alicyn and her friend, Stephanie Brown, amusing themselves with books whilst waiting for supper after a day spent swimming, fishing and giggling on the Rideau Lakes in Ontario. Everyone knows how having a friend and some books along helps spending otherwise boring weekends afloat with Mom and Dad so much more fun.
When Alicyn was seven we spent Christmas and New Year’s Eve on a Bahamian Out Island in a rustic cottage without electricity or running water. Fortunately, Santa Claus found us and brought a complete set of the Anne of Green Gables books.
Alicyn and Anne quickly became kindred spirits; Alicyn couldn’t wait for Mom or Dad to read her the books. She dove in herself to race through page after page of thrilling girlhood adventures, asking occasionally how to say a big word or what it meant. Alicyn was Anne; Ann was Alicyn. And Alicyn became hooked on books forevermore! Her Grade 3 teacher was amazed: Alicyn went, in a three-week vacation, from reading at her grade level to reading far beyond it. Mom and Dad enjoyed it too because they got to hear, read loudly and excitably, by Alicyn-cum-Anne, the very best parts, thus letting us, too, revel in the daily discoveries of our Anne-enraptured daughter. That’s one vacation that saw the return of a happy, contented, closely bonded family. Thank you, Lucy Maud Montgomery!
Thank you, too, Morning Star, for bringing back memories of what shared fun it is to read or to be read to by your child, especially while snuggling them on your lap. I had forgotten about the giggles provoked by making funny sounds or using different voices and being goofy while reading aloud Peter Cottontail, Green Eggs and Ham, Wind in the Willows or Three Billy Goats Gruff.
