Short Stories, Part I

I Blame My School...

I love short stories.

Recently, I tried to define why, and I concluded that my grade school was to blame.

That was the place, after all, that loaned me textbooks titled Rainbows, and Kaleidoscope, and Serendipity, which, along with lessons in pronunciation and vocabulary, also contained all sorts of wonderful short stories.  There were short poems, too, and the end of each unit featured a chapter from a longer book;  some of these were "meh," but others inspired me to seek out the original.

But oh, those stories!  Whenever I would get my reading book for the year, I would start reading.  The lesson parts were boring, so I would always skip that stuff and go right for the short stories.  I was usually done with my reading book before anybody else in class, but I never minded going back and re-reading the assigned story for the day.

Here are some of the stories I remember from those old readers.  I don't remember all the titles, or even all the authors, but the stories themselves are still vivid after all these years:

The Talking Wire (author unknown) - A boy goes to stay with an older relative, who is a telegraph operator for the railroad.  The old man demonstrates the Morse code for the station where he works (FS, for Fir Spring), and explains that if that signal ever comes over the receiver, it means someone on the wire is trying to get the operator's attention for something important.  The man leaves to do something, and the boy sits and listens to all the clicks and clacks coming over the wire, and suddenly the FS signal comes through, again and again!  The boy runs for his...uncle? Grandpa?...and convinces him that he really did  hear the signal, and when the old man goes in and answers, it turns out that something has happened to the track ahead, and an approaching train must be stopped.  The old man sets up a signal, the train stops, the boy gets kudos and the promise of real lessons in Morse starting the next day.  Hurray...but I always wondered why it couldn't have been a girl doing that.  A lot of these stories are like that.

The Fun They Had (Isaac Asimov) - This one's a classic.  In a future where each child has his own computerized "teacher," a boy finds an actual, physical book in his attic and brings it to a girl's house, where they puzzle over words that stand still, classrooms with lots of kids (the book is about school as we would understand it), and human teachers (everybody knows that a human isn't knowledgeable enough to teach each child at his or her optimal level)!

Here's one I don't remember author or title for:  A boy sets off on a "magical journey,"  in which he encounters danger, has adventures, and finally returns home...but the pictures for the story reveal that he is walking through an ordinary town, seeing an old tree, stopping for ice cream, etc.  The magic is all in his mind!  I read this story and came away with the sense that the author knew me, because I spent half my childhood overlaying imaginary landscapes and adventures over my ordinary environment!  (Just as an example:  our water tower had a red top.  Naturally it became a volcano.  And because of the way my mind worked, it was a pet volcano that would never erupt so as to hurt anyone!)

Evan's Corner (author unknown) -  A boy in the inner city, who lives in a small apartment with a large family, can't have his own room.  So he chooses a corner of the living room and tells everyone, "This is my corner."  Everybody respects this.  Evan decorates his corner with a plant (the corner is by a window), some pictures, books, etc. ...but once he gets his corner just the way he likes it, Evan still feels that something is missing.  The missing thing is other people to share the corner.  A nice lesson, but I remember feeling sad at the poverty of that family (the pictures showed them as black).

Another one without any identifiers:  A boy (again, a black kid) wants a guitar.  He tries making his own by nailing a slat onto a shallow wooden box, then stretching rubber bands over it.  The results, as you can guess, are terrible--one of the illustrations shows the boy playing his homemade contraption, with one of his older siblings wincing at the noise!  The boy is advised to earn money and save it for a real guitar (pic of kid writing "GUITAR MONEY" on the label of an empty tin can).  The boy succeeds in his quest, of course; the final illustration shows him playing his instrument on his porch steps.

This Was Just A Sample.

If you ever get your hands on any of these books, look for the stories I just recapped, and see if I'm not right about how awesome they were.  Next post, I'll list some of the stories I've read since then!