Ten-Finger Exercises

classic but not timeless

When my grandchildren were visiting, they wanted me to read them some stories at bedtime, which I love doing. I found an old book of their mother's which contained a lot of stories I remember from when I was a child. This was A Treasury of Little Golden Books. It held such classics as The Little Engine That Could and The Poky Little Puppy. I was sure it was filled with other gems that would never go out of style. That wasn't quite true.

It didn't seem to bother the twins any that all the trains had coal cars and baggage cars and black smoke funneling out smokestack. They liked the circus parades that showed up in several stories, although I have to admit I haven't seen one of those since I was their age, and only once at that.

It did seem strange to them that the "fat little policeman" stood in the middle of the street to direct traffic; and that a boy named Johnny, who was entranced with machines, was excited by making a toaster work. When Johnny investigated the farm machines, the seeder and the brooder, those were strange them because they've always lived in the city, but a toaster?

One thing that struck me was that each family had a mommy and a daddy. I'm glad the twins didn't notice that that is no longer the norm.

Another thing that surprised me was that some of the stories were written very badly, with lots of run-on sentences. If I compare them to the modern Disney books that came out after movies, they were still more fun to read. Have you ever read Toy Story for instance? It was such a wonderful movie, but the book has no charm. I've found that true of all the Disney books. It's as if they were written by computer or a technical writer.

Even though the old stories were mostly familiar and seemed written to be read aloud, it was the illustrations that I remembered best. I felt such nostalgia looking at the picture of the woman washing her clothes in the stream where Jersey cows are standing, watching Scuffy the tugboat float by. Or seeing the Saggy Baggy Elephant holding up his skin. Or feeling the childish joy of Tootle the train when he leaves his tracks and romps in the meadows with the butterflies, decked out in daisy chains.