Friendly Story Caravan

During Meeting for Worship, I often scrounged the little library for books a kid could comfortably read. There weren't many; most of the books were grownup books with no discernible story to them, but I usually didn't mind re-reading one of the few books with good stories. Sitting on the hard floor with my chosen book, I fit neatly between the shelves, my back up against the shelves that were set up across the windows, my feet pressing the bottom shelf of the shelves which formed the partition of the hallway; the wide hallway, all windows on either side, between the big, airy Meeting Room and the long, wide Fellowship Room where the piano was and where, after Meeting, they'd be setting out the food for the monthly Luncheon.

The librarian had fought the good fight for this space, half the width and the length of the hallway, a bitter fight barely won. He was a large round man with a passion for books and a concern for tent-caterpillars. He didn't like how they destroyed trees, and I agreed with him.

My other choice for not going to Meeting was to go out alone in the woods over the other side of the marshy stream that ran behind the Meetinghouse, and invent stories to tell myself among the old, overgrown fields that were partitioned into rooms by chin-high junipers, watched over by the few white pines and maples growing up from between the junipers. Stories that always had happy endings, everyone winds up friends.

I could have joined the Sunday School games for kids, but that was too many people for me. Even though they were fun, cooperative games, not the least bit like the competitive games at school, not the least bit preachy. There were just too many people liable to do unpredictable things.

Friendly Story Caravan was about my size for human company: lots of people safely contained in print, always saying and doing the same things they did last time, stories I could read over and over. Young people living in families acting from the values that I liked: fairness, kindness, consideration for the feelings of others, working towards peaceful coexistence of people from different cultures. Carefully curated stories: I look back and imagine the stories that didn't get included, ones where the settlers didn't survive the violence in the clash with the people who'd lived there before the settlements were built in the New World; ones where the runaway slave family did not make it to the first stop on the Underground Railway; ones where there was no enemy combatant with the generosity to care for the wounded soldier. Ones where the old crazy woman starved to death, cold and alone, because there was no neighbor girl with the gumption (and the sanction of her parents) to go light the fire in the witch's house when the smoke stopped coming from the chimney, and make soup and feed the old woman back to something like health and sanity.

But as a kid, I didn't question the stories that comforted me.