Spring Break I

Vacation — glorious, almost responsibility-free vacation.

It's vacation, and yet my activities remain related in some concrete or abstract fashion to my veterinary goals. Even relaxing is in preparation for the anticipated grind.

I've been reading "The Wheel on the School" by Meindert DeJong. It's a Newberry Medal winner, so I was curious to analyze it from that point of view, see if I could figure out what garnered it such an honor. I think I've figured it out a little. The author gives colorful, wisecracking personalities to some of the characters. And they had impetus, they weren't shy and grovelling and unwilling to step out of their comfort zones. Some of the happenings are down right goofy and imaginative - the author allowed his imagination to fly and really didn't rein it in significantly (how's that for a mixed metaphor - or maybe Pegasus would fit there?), apart from keeping the book within the realms of the possible. The author had a keen understanding of normal, slightly spontaneous and off-the-wall people. And yet what really stands out is the whole plot and the results of the main story. It starts out with a school day in a town in Holland, and the spontaneous teacher and his six students get started on this idea about getting storks to nest in their town (Shora). He encourages them to dream, and see where it takes them - and that is what the book is about. The dream of bringing storks to Shora leads to relationships kindled with two elderly people in the town, who were previously regarded as unimportant by the school children. A legless man of whom the children had stood in terror becomes a friend of them and their Dream; his life receives new meaning and he even shows up at church. One of the boys helps a tinman keep his wagon wheel together on the tinman's way home, and manages a swap of the beat up tinman's wheel with a sturdy, patriotically painted wheel that an unfriendly man had been planning to put on his house - the swap of the wheels sent each wheel to a place where it could serve the best. The Dream got the seafaring fathers involved in another aspect of their children's lives.
Would I recommend the book? Probably not for children unless accompanied by discussion of the non-Christian values present in the book.


Last evening (Sunday) at church the children were invited forward and asked to pick songs they wanted to sing. And they chose songs like "Building Up the Temple," "12 Men Went to Spy out Canaan," "Jesus Loves the Little Children" — right? Wrong. They chose "Give Me Thy Heart," "All Hail to Thee, Immanuel," etc. No "Children's Songs," even though they were encouraged that they could choose choruses, that the songs didn't have to be from the hymnals. It reminded me of my song preferences as a child (I did not appreciate songs like "This is My Father's World," "Trust and Obey," etc - they were way too commonplace and/or had simplistic tunes.), and made me wonder if the song preferences adults assume children to have are largely fallacious. Maybe most children appreciate the variety and complexity of "big people's songs."

I wonder how much I will have forgotten about my childhood preferences by the time and if I ever have children. I hope I will be able to understand them and not be disconnected from their patterns of reasoning. And yet time is moving on, years are separating the present me from my childhood. Maybe I should write childhood remembrances now to read in the future and remind myself of how I thought.