“A most prized possession”
This writing
prompt asks that you select something you have or have had that means something
to you. It should be a treasure, but not necessarily a monetary one. It should
be something that has been special to you for a long time and you have kept in
your heart if not in reality.
Although my
wife comes to mind immediately, this is not really a reasonable choice. Not a
good idea to go there in this day and age. Just in
case you need to be reminded, women are no longer owned objects to be
controlled by men.
This leads
me into a more physical domain. In spite of heart stutters, a bum shoulder, and
all-round old age, I do treasure the blessing of my continued mobility. It is
one of those things we don’t think about until it is disappearing. The ability
to go about your daily regimen, albeit more slowly than before, is a treasured possession
for any senior citizen.
Tied to the
physical world would be to choose the treasured memories of a lifetime of travel.
For many, those recollections are
contained in the now fading photos or slides of far-flung places and past family
gatherings.
Just as
easily I could select a group of memories of the college students I have
encountered over the years and the experiences bound up in the plays directed
and sets constructed. More than a few of these students have kept a place in
their lives for attending or making live theatre. Several met their mate while participating
in one of my productions. Though now long gone from their alma maters and
working and raising families of their own, I continue to enjoy their lives vicariously
via some of the positive features of the modern social media.
But finally,
I have focused on books. I offer no
apology for choosing them as a valuable personal treasure. Teaching has been my life and books have been
as constant a companion as my loving spouse. They lined the walls of my office
and of my study at home. The difficulty remains that this option is plural and
keeps me from focusing on a singular personal antecedent.
With that in
mind, I have boiled the choice down to a single representative book. It is my
treasured copy of Richard Haliburton’s Complete Book of Marvels. It is, as of now, my most prized possession. I am looking at it on the shelf as I write
this and am quite sure it can be used as a seminal first cause. The copy I own
comes from the 1960’s. I am not quite sure when or where I bought it, but it
has traveled with me for years. It is a
hardback and unquestionably shopworn. The paper jacket is still on although pretty
torn and tattered. The jacket blurb proclaims proudly that it is “the most
popular adventure book of our times.” The times are the 1930’s prior to its
copywrite date of 1937. What I do know
is that it was a library discard and the evidence of my attempts, without much
success, to pry off the old card pocket are still there to see.
You now have a right to ask why this volume has kept its place on my bookshelf over several moves and many years? This is where in old movies you see calendar pages sliding slowly backward in time to a younger and simpler age.
My mother
was a high school graduate and an avid reader. She even belonged to the Book of
the Month club. Dad, not so much, partly
because reduced circumstances took him into the work force and out of school
after his sophomore year in high school.
They both did, however, share one commonality. That was that they would
see to it that I and my sister would get a good education. My mother quit her
secretarial job when I was born and one of the things I remember from my early
life was she took me religiously to the branch library on Burleigh Street in
Milwaukee every week from an early age. It
was first just for picture books and then on to real reading books as I entered
the early grades. I was hooked and was devouring anything in print before I was
eight. Significantly fairy tales and travel
to faraway places were tops on my list.
Adventure
drew me like a bee to nectar and somewhere between my 8th and 10th
birthday Richard Halliburton’s Complete Book of Marvels came my
way. Halliburton often wrote for a younger
audience and excelled in describing his travels around the Occident and the
Orient. He wrote in the first person and in simple descriptive prose. Facts were interspersed with questions and he had
a penchant for throwing himself dramatically into his role as both narrator and
participant in the scene he was describing. Take for instance his introduction
to his first wonder—the San Francisco Bay Bridge. He said, “Have you ever walked eight
miles? Were you tired? How long did it take? . . . Now imagine
walking and walking and walking for three hours all on the same enormous
bridge.” Yes, it’s a bit corny now. Time
has not always been kind to Halliburton’s efforts, but I know for a fact that
it got my travel juices flowing. I still would not trade his tale of swimming
the Panama Canal (he is still today the smallest vessel ever to be locked
through) or jumping into the “Well if Death” at the Mayan city of Chichen Itza
for anything in the world. I must admit that I did not swim the canal or jump
into the Well of Death like Richard did, but I have since passed through that canal
and visited the “great well” and other
monuments at Chichen Itza.
What now still
makes this volume an important and valuable keepsake? I guess because my copy of the book carries
twenty-five checkmarks noting which ones of Halliburton’s fifty-five wonders of
the world I have visited thus far. Now in my eighties, that bucket list still
has some places and “miles to go” before I sleep, but with a little bit of
luck this scrappy kid from a working
class family in Milwaukee might be able to add another checkmark or two to that
book’s Table of Contents.
*A footnote:
Richard Halliburton disappeared in 1939 while
trying to sail a specially constructed Chinese Junk named “The Sea Dragon”
across the Pacific Ocean from Hong Kong to the San Francisco World Fair. No
sign of his ship or its crew has ever been found.
Jim De
Young 7/24/2023
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