My friend Heather’s father is a psychologist, and he has a theory that our earliest memories, and the way we describe them, reflect how we think about and perceive the world as adults. So if your earliest memory is tense and unhappy, this line of reasoning goes, you’re more likely to have a negative outlook on life.
I don’t know if any of this is true, but it’s an interesting theory, and not just because it always makes me rack my brain for my earliest memory. Over time, I’ve a developed a similar theory of my own, and although I certainly don’t have the same level of expertise as Heather’s dad, I think it’s got some merit: I’ve decided that the books we love as children reveal a lot about the type of people we eventually become.
One of my favorite children’s books of all time is “Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day,” by Judith Viorst, which I first read in the second grade and has stayed with me ever since. The book is written in the first person, with Alexander describing his awful day in painstaking detail. “I went to sleep with gum in my mouth and now there’s gum in my hair and when I got out of bed this morning I tripped on the skateboard and by mistake I dropped my sweater in the sink while the water was running and I could tell it was going to be a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day,” he complains, and it gets worse from there, because Alexander also has to sit in the middle seat in the car, there’s no dessert in his lunch bag, the dentist finds a cavity, and he’s forced to sleep in his railroad train pajamas.
I don’t remember exactly what sorts of awful things were happening to me when I was 8, but I really related to Alexander, and I remember penning a note to my second-grade teacher describing similar hardships. “I guess you could call it Sara Foss and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day,” I wrote angrily. I can’t recall what inspired this note — maybe my parents ordered a pizza with onions as a topping, despite knowing full well that I hate onions, or maybe I lost a mitten, or maybe it rained and we weren’t allowed to go outside for recess — but I wasn’t happy.
Kids love Alexander. I’m sure some of them outgrow his tale of woe (“Stop whining, Alexander! Life isn’t that bad!) but I’ve never stopped relating to him, and last week, when I experienced one of those days where nothing goes quite right, I thought of him. The aggravations started early in the day, and just kept coming. I went to the YMCA to swim laps before work, only to find that I’d forgotten my bathing suit. I went to the bank, but it wasn’t open yet. I went to the dentist to get a crown and it cost about $400 more than I expected. Then I went back to the bank, only to discover that on Tuesdays the bank closes at 3. And then it rained again.
It seemed only fitting that the day would begin and end with me standing outside a locked bank, and so I stomped home and waited for the novocaine to wear off, all the while thinking, “What a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day.” Periodically, I would try to keep things in perspective by reminding myself that a good friend of mine just had open heart surgery, and that I should stop feeling sorry for myself, since getting a crown isn’t nearly as painful and scary as open heart surgery, but such thoughts did little to stave off the self pity, maybe because what Alexander and I really share is a gift for hyperbole, and ceaseless self-absorption.
“Alexander” isn’t the only book from childhood that still resonates today. “Then Again, Maybe I Won’t,” by Judy Blume, has always been one of my favorites, and occasionally I reread it, because it’s amazing how much I still relate to the narrator, who has some serious doubts about his place in the world. Then there’s the book “Private, Parents Keep Out!”, where author Austin Stevens writes about building a tree fort and forming a secret club with his friends. When my friends and I formed our secret club in middle school, we remembered one of Stevens’ lessons: Any secret club worth its salt operates without parental interference or involvement. Of course, this may explain why we never succeeded in building a tree fort, none of us being engineers or carpenters, but it may also explain why I like to do and figure things out on my own.
There’s a series of documentaries, called the “Up” documentaries, directed by Michael Apted. Apted took a group of 7-year-old British schoolchildren in the 1960s, and filmed them playing and talking about their lives. Every seven years he revisits them, and films another documentary. I’ve seen most of them — the most recent is “49 Up,” released in 2005 — and what’s intriguing is how Apted’s subjects grow and mature, but for the most part remain true to their 7-year-old selves. A boy who speaks earnestly of wanting to become a missionary so he can help people later is seen teaching in a low-income urban school district.
The “Up” documentaries don’t tell us what books these people loved when they were 7, but I’m sure a glimpse of their childhood bookcases would be pretty revealing. That’s my theory, anyway, and I’m sticking to it. In the meantime, maybe I’ll go reread “The Chocolate War,” and ponder why I found such a bleak and disturbing book so compelling when I was in third grade.
