While listening recently to the 1973 Dobie Gray classic "Drift Away," I realized something, or rather, something came back to me that I had not considered in a long time. I have always been drawn to music in a minor key and to melancholy stories that seem to be wrapped in mist. Such are the songs and stories that have touched that indefinable place in me and have constituted much of the literature I have memorized over the years.
16th Century Grade School Choir
I first realized how much more deeply a minor key affected me than did a major key when the two were presented to us in music class somewhere around the second or third grade. When our music teacher played one against the other, I knew instantly which touched me more, and it was sometime around fifth grade that I first encountered the sixteenth century English ballad "Greensleeves." Clearly, there is nothing about the lyrics to which a boy of eleven could relate, and yet that song took me somewhere that I seemed to know as if through a dream, a place long lost and to which I yearned to return.
It was also during those early years that I discovered "One Tin Soldier" by Coven and "Beth" by KISS. Although the themes of both are somewhat beyond the reckoning of a child, they both moved me deeply, and from those days until now I am incapable of hearing the Coven piece without weeping. Clearly, something was afoot.
Non-Pandering Kiddy Lit
There are many books aimed at children that cater and even pander to their immature instincts, often by falling back on bathroom humor. Two books from my elementary years that not only did not hold up a mirror to my childish self but took me out of that self into remembered places where I had never been, were Island of the Blue Dolphins by Scott O'Dell and My Side of the Mountain by Jean Craighead George. Nearly fifty years after first reading both of those books, they remain in my mind and in my heart. A few years ago, I re-read Island of the Blue Dolphins for my own pleasure, and I recall reading My Side of the Mountain to our son when he was a boy.
My mother respected children. Many, if not most, will say they like children, but my mother genuinely respected their feelings and views of the world. She affirmed their emotions and never wrote them off as stemming merely from the experience of a child. She knew what the authors of the best children's literature have known, that young ones, while not always able to articulate their feelings as adults would, nevertheless feel deeply. Of course, we adults know that some of the deepest feelings arise from the minor keys of life, those moments of longing or loss or the indefinable mists of mystery, and these are the elements that make for truly memorable literature.
The quiet, reflective soul will always, I think, be drawn to the minor keys and melancholy mists of life, whether through music or art or literature, or, for the truly fortunate ones, through all three. Those of us who work with children do well to have the perspective my mother had, one that respects the deep and ineffable feelings of young people. When we do, we may just be led to introduce them to those minor keys and melancholy mists to which their souls will return often in the years to come.
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