The lack of persistence of childhood memories
As a parent, watching my kids grow bumps into memories of my own childhood, sometimes with stark clarity and sometimes like when you forget about that top step when walking up a staircase in a dream.
Now that my eight year old girl has become a big reader, I find myself remembering the books that I read as a kid, and that’s the reason for today’s post: can you help me identify a book?
The book: I have a clear memory from the 1970s of reading a book about a boy inventor who — in an aside — created a simple machine to help him make his bed. It was a lever of some sort that attached to the top of the sheets and blankets, and when he got out of bed in the morning he would pull the lever and it would pull the bed into shape.
That’s all I remember, and it’s driving me crazy.
For a while I thought it was “Homer Price” by Robert McCloskey, but I then found that book in our local library, read it, and discovered I was wrong. Then I thought it was “Henry Reed, Inc.” by Keith Robertson (with illustrations by McCloskey), but I checked THAT one out of the library and so far, no dice.
The incredible book stumper archives at Loganberry Books didn’t help, and I submitted a query to the CBC’s “Lost Childhood Books” radio show (please, kind Canadians, help me!), but I thought that perhaps somebody reading this might recognize the book.
If you can help, please contact me via the form on this page or by commenting.
Does this post have a lot to do with media? Only in the sense that how we remember media — one of my strongest areas of intellectual interest — changes with time, and how we re-experience all culture as we get older can create an uncanny double sense of visiting our former selves along with the song, story, painting, book, TV show or movie in question. Today’s content-hungry internet and cable jumbles everything together into one big media haggis, and that can wreak havoc on our memories.
In her classic 1967 essay, “Movies on Television” (anthologized in “For Keeps,” 1994, among other places), Pauline Kael wrote about this:
People who see a movie for the first time on television don’t remember it the same way that people do who saw it in a theatre. Even without the specific visual loss that results from the transfer to another medium, it’s doubtful whether a movie could have as intense an impact as it had in its own time. Probably by definition, works that are not truly great cannot be as compelling out of their time. Sinclair Lewis’s and Hemingway’s novels were becoming archaic while their authors lived. Can On the Waterfront have the impact now that it had in 1954? Not quite. And revivals in move theatres don’t have the same kind of charge, either. There’s something a little stale in the air, there’s a different kind of audience. At a revival, we must allow for the period, or care because of the period. Television viewers seeing old movies for the first time can have very little sense of how and why new stars moved us when they appeared, of the excitement of new themes, of what these movies meant to us.
What would Kael have made of media today, I wonder.
One Response to “The lack of persistence of childhood memories”
1 David 20 November 2009 @ 2:33 pm
You were in the right ballpark, but the book is “The Marvelous Inventions of Alvin Fernald,” by Clifford Hicks, who also wrote the “Peter Potts” books, as well as other Alvins. I recall “Alvin’s Swap Shop” and “Alvin Fernald: Mayor for a Day” fondly.
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