I wish I could have some profound way of starting this essay or even something or someone to tie it together, but the truth is that last week, I fell down one of hte more random Internet rabbit holes. Although I don’t know if this was a rabbit hole beacuse I was actually finding the answer to something and had some serendipity come along with it. Either way I think I am probably the only person in the world who does a fist pump the moment he discovers his sixth grade reading textbook on the Internet Archive.
The timing of my search for it does make sense, though. It was my last week of summer break and I didn’t have much to do on the day when it was pouring out, so I decided to look into some of the topics on the very large list of topics for possible blog posts and then remembered that years ago, I’d purchased a copy of The Mine of Lost Days by Marc Brandel. It’s a children’s/young adult novel published in 1975 that’s about a kid visiting relatives in Ireland and finding a group of children in a mine who are actually from more than 100 years ago. I remembered liking the book when I was a kid and had bought it because I had been looking for an answer to my very specific question: “What was that novel that was in Point?”
Point was a book published in 1982 as part of the Addison-Wesley Reading Program and at Lincoln Avenue Elementary was considered the highest level of reading book that you could hit. I was a high-achieving reader through all of elementary school, so I was pretty sure that as I was working my way through Green Salad Seasons in the fifth grade, I would wind up being one of those cool kids in sixth grade carrying around the elite reading book–and nothing says elite like a textbook with a unicorn on the cover. I probably had to cover it with a brown paper bag anyway.
Point‘s elite status lost a little bit of its luster when my sixth grade teacher, Ms. Frei, told us that everyone in the class was reading from it. Modern pedagogy says that this is probalby not a good idea (although to be fair, modern pedagogy gives you conflicting information on everything from instructional approach to whether or not you should put a poster on the wall), although now that I have been teaching for about 20 years, I see the case of having everyone read the same thing at the same time. Besides, she had us do a lot beyond simply trudge our way through a reading book story by story–there were book reports, research projects, and the occasional short story from a 1970 reading book called To Turn a Stone, which sounds like the most 1970 title for a reading book ever. I remember one story from that collection called “The Cave” where this kid who is in a gang befriends a homeless guy who lives in a cave and then his gang runs the guy off so they can use the cave for their new hideout. He winds up fighting the gang leader and getting kicked out, then makes a vow to join the other gang and get revenge. Between this and The Outsiders in the eighth grade, no wonder my generation was largely feral.
Anyway, whereas To Turn a Stone had an early Seventies feel and the Ginn readers had conforting early Eighties word art, Point was Eighties cool. Okay, not cool to the cool boys in their Op T-shirts who skated on their Veritech skateboards, because they wouldn’t be caught dead with it. It still seemed kind of cool to me and when you think about it, it’s too bad that Eighties childhoods were so gendered. But that’s probably something for another discussion another day; besides, it wasn’t just the cover that was cool. Inside the book was the usual collection of stories that had illustrated title pages, but things were arranged in “issues” rather than chapters or units because the book was called “A Magazine Reader” and they all were more or less formatted like issues of a magazine. You’d start with “To the Point,” which had letters to the editor and end with “Departure Point”, which was a pretty cool-looking photograph. Maybe it was a reading program magazine published in the 1970s and this collected it?
Between the pages were short stories, poems, and non-fiction pieces, many of which were thematically connected, which is par for the course as far as English textbooks are concerned. What stuck out to me as things I remembered clearly once I started looking through it were three stories. One, The Witch and the Ring by John Bellairs, is part of a larger novel in the series The House With a Clock in Its Walls, which was an American YA fantasy series from the 1970s whose premiere title kind of reminds me of The Chronicles of Narnia (in the very least, the title sounded like The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe). The idea of a kid discovering some crazy world in a scary house or something similar wasn’t too far fetched, especially since movies like The NeverEnding Story were formative parts of my childhood. And the same can be said for The Mine of Lost Days. I remember that my friends and I were obsessed with The Mine of Lost Days as we wer ereading it and tried really hard not to read ahead and I’d get annoyed when I missed days due to having to go to the gifted and talented program.
Like I said, the novel’s premise is that a kid visits his family in Ireland and comes across some crazy stuff. Henry, who is American, comes across a seemingly abandoned mine and when he explains it discovers a family of kids who seem to be eixsting in 1845, which is when the great Irish Potato Famine began. He eventually realizes that the mine is some sort of limbo and the kids have the abaility to shape the reality inside the mine and even travel through time and to different places. Meanwhile, in present day, he’s befriended the granddaughter of one of the kids’ family members who survived the famine because he didn’t hide in the mine and actually had been looking for them his whole life.
When I went looking for this novel, it was tough to find at first because it’s been out of print for years, but I eventually found it on Thriftbooks and recently re-read it in about a day as it’s clearly the sort of thing that would have been displayed in an elementary school library. Much like Point made me feel like I was back in the Eighties, The Mine of Lost Days ftook me back there was well, to that sort of ‘escape” fiction where magical worlds exist behind doors, or in this case in a mine. Not only that, the protagonists were normal and stayed normal,w ith the adventure clearly marking soem milestone like the end of childhood. Middle grade yA fantasy over the last few decades has been very good, but what I’ve read seems to always have the main characters discovering their extroridnary birthright or their powers as part of their destiny. Henry is a kid who is clearly on the precipice of adolesence, especially in the way he strikes up a friendship with the granddaughter, Jane, as an important bond forms between the two of them when he’s outside the mine. Inside the mine, he comes to realize that the kids he’s met are better off there, especially after a near-disastrous Old West adventure.
I want to say that The Mine of Lost Days was one of my very last “kids” novels, especially when it came to kid fantasy, and the story “Collecting Team” was my first step into a world of more “mature” science fiction. It kind of is, although there were other books I read as I went through sixth and into seventh grade, so it’s not so clean cut. But “Collecting Team” was one of the first pieces of science fiction that I read that wasn’t something like Star Wars or Star Trek. The story, written by Robert Silverberg, is about a team of scientists on an interstellar mission who land on a planet to collect various samples. Things start to get weird and they eventually discover–in a classic sci-fi story twist–that they are actually on an interplanetary zoo and have been collected by a race of aliens to be in the Earth exhibit.
Of all the stories that we read in sixth grade, this stood out to the point that whereas I had to search for The Mine of Lost Days based on a random memory and only remembered “The Cave” when I found To Turn a Stone on the Internet Archive, I remember “Collecting Team”and its plot vividly. Maybe it was because Ms. Frei had us write our own versions of some of these stories. Or were they sequels? All I remember is that I wrote a story where the team tried to fight its way off of the planet. I don’t remember much more than that and the story itself has been lost to time, but I do remember that my teacher really liked it.
In retrospect, it’s no wonder I got a reputation as a teacher’s pet–someone even told my seventh grade art teacher that I “kissed up to teachers” and she decided to tell my entire class–because I really liked school and have always wanted to make people happy or proud of me. But the lasting impact is something I didn’t realize until I was writing this blog post. I mean, I wanted to find the reading book for sixth grade and see if I remembered the stories as well as I thought I did; I didn’t expect to realize this was a very early step toward my becoming someone who writes. I’d written other stories before but there was something about the feeling of writing it that stuck with me and I took it with me to creative writing class as a senior, which is where I really discovered I wanted to be a writer.
Ms. Frei, would write some wonderful things in my sixth grade yearbook (which I still have in a box and have been too lazy to take out to include here), and was so expressive about how much seh was going to miss me when graduation and the last day of school rolled aorund. I moved up and on and don’t think I set foot in Lincoln Avenue Elementary very much after that. But I would see her one mroe time, at the very last home game of the football season my senior year. Aise from homeocming, I never went to high school games, but I was hanging out with my friend Cathy and itw as one of those picturesque small-town fall days that kind of begs you to be outside so you can savor it. At any rate, we were sitting in the stands and this woman said she thought she recognized me. it was Ms. Frei and we chatted for a while, and at one point she told me, “I remember the brain power.” That was thirty years ago and I can picture that exact conversation. I didn’t expect that to make me smile today, but it did.