Books I Have Loved

Title: Understood Betsy
Author: Dorothy Canfield Fisher
First Read: Stadium Elementary School
When: 1960s

I've just finished reading, for probably the umpteenth time, this little gem from the prolific Fisher, who wrote with great fondness about the people of Vermont and her educational interest in the Montessori method of teaching. The book was published in 1917, but this year is actually celebrating its centenary first publication in 1916, in (of course) "St. Nicholas" magazine. Had it been written, even in a period format, today, I doubt it would contain so many of Fisher's sometimes pedantic little asides (like the one where she tries to explain what "personality" is) and would tell Betsy's story more directly. But don't dismiss all those little asides right away, for they give away important plot points as well!

As the book opens, Elizabeth Ann is a sickly, shy, and scared nine-year old. At six months old, after her parents' death in a car crash, she is adopted by her father's aunt Harriet and Harriet's daughter Frances, who believe they are rescuing the poor mite from her strict New England family on her mother's side. Frances, who Elizabeth Ann also calls "Aunt," immediately throws herself heart and soul into raising the orphan child, joining a Mother's Club and reading all the child-rearing literature she can get her hands on.

Today we would peg Aunt Frances as "a helicopter parent," but she does so much more damage: in her well-meaning attempts to nurture the little girl (revealing, in one of Fisher's asides, that Frances never thought her mother took enough of an interest in her), she has projected all her fears and prejudices onto the child. Elizabeth Ann can't go to school and back without being walked by Aunt Frances, takes lessons she doesn't want, and is afraid of nearly everything (especially that Aunt Frances is). She is literally smothered with love by a woman who secretly feels unloved. Then one day when Aunt Frances calls the doctor for Elizabeth Ann, Aunt Harriet makes the mistake of coughing. Next thing the sensitive child knows, Aunt Frances is absorbed in caring for her mother and planning to get her to a warm climate (the cough being indicative of tuberculosis, I'm pretty sure), while leaving Elizabeth Ann with some distant cousins who don't even want her.

But it is here at the end of chapter one that fate intervenes: Elizabeth Ann's cousins are in quarantine. With nowhere else to go, they decide to send her to the last place she would ever choose: to Vermont to live with "the awful Putney cousins" who actually force children to (gasp!) do chores like they are hired hands! Before she knows it, the little girl is on a train, on a cold January day, heading to meet three of the villains of her childhood nightmares, her mother's aunt Harriet and her Uncle Henry, and daughter Cousin Ann.

Yet Elizabeth Ann doesn't know that this will be her liberation. Once at Putney Farm, she will find confidence, health, and self-esteem as she is given the freedom to discover the world without the stultifying embrace of Aunt Frances. When Uncle Henry hands her the reins of the farm wagon and asks her to drive the team of horses home from the train depot, she is on her way in more ways than one.

The rest of the novel is filled with her delightful discovery of the farm, a new pet cat, a new school and classmates, the tiny child Molly for whom she will become a protector, and even charitable gestures like helping an impoverished classmate. With her we discover the joys of the one-room school, sugar-on-snow, and antique dolls, and some of those "awful chores" turn out to be fun (like making applesauce) and educational (like making butter in a dairy that was around during the Revolutionary War). Most importantly, she is embraced by a love which is total but not oppressive. As the story ends, she must make a difficult decision about what to do with the rest of her life.

Just writing about this book makes me smile. Yes, for today's audience, the narrative may be a bit stilted. But Betsy's story will eventually make you cry and cheer.

Perennial

The local PBS station is running a special on folk music that is, of course, one big fundraising effort. I'd taken the dog outside to Rick Steves' talking about European festivals and returned to find the 1960s had returned: Judy Collins was singing "Both Sides Now." Wheeee. Childhood came rushing back. Between the sets of the special, they are hawking a four-CD set of classic folk.

My mind paused on "Puff the Magic Dragon."

Rewind. It's kindergarten or first grade. We're back in the 1960s, remember. No t-shirts, jeans, ratty sneakers in this classroom. The girls are in dresses or skirts and blouses, in tidy white anklets or leotards, depending on the time of year. The boys are in collared shirts, mostly button down, and pants with belts. Shoes are the usual footwear, with a smattering of clean sneakers among the boys (no mother worth her salt sent her kids to school in dirty clothes or footwear; the other mothers would talk) and patent leather for the more fastidious of the girls. Hair is short and neatly parted among the boys; the girls' hair, if not short, is pulled back tidily with barrettes or headbands.

The classroom is tidy, with wood-topped desks with metal legs and undercarriage. One wall of the classroom is three-quarters window, a row of which can be opened with a window pole on warm days. A flag is near the wooden teachers' desk. We start the day by standing to "The Star Spangled Banner" and saying the Pledge of Allegiance. The blackboard (not a whiteboard, but a genuine chalkboard upon which the teacher uses colored chalk on special occasions) is topped with cards of alphabet letters and a corresponding picture: A for Apple, B for Ball (or Boat), C for Cat, etc. and a row of Arabic numerals. At the back of the classroom is a big corkboard that is decorated and redecorated by month: back to school with apples and slates in September, leaves and jack o'lanterns in October, and so on. There are also corkboards on the tilting doors that cover the coat closet, and on those the best papers of the week go: Allen got an A+ in spelling, Arlene got 100 in addition.

It's fingerpainting day, so we may actually be in older versions of our clothes. I can't remember if the teacher gave our mothers warning so that spills wouldn't stain good clothes. Whatever. We were swathed in big aprons anyway, and the floors were covered in newspaper on which we spread our big white sheets of fingerpainting paper. The teacher, an older woman (to us positively ancient, like our parents, although she was probably only in her 50s), has the bold bright blues and reds and yellows in big cans and pours out smaller portions for each pupil.

To accompany our artistic efforts, we have some music. This is supplied back then by the classic "school phonograph," a big, heavy "portable" unit with rough burlap on the case cover in a really ugly khaki brown. The teacher has a stack of 45 rpm records with songs suited for kids and starts with a favorite: "Puff the Magic Dragon."

I doubt that in those days we understood the full import of the song, but we understood enough about its melancholy theme: loss of innocence as we age. As we swept fingers through the gooey paint and spread it liberally over the white paper in abstract designs understandable only to its child creator, we sang along about Puff and Jackie Paper and how Puff went away when Jackie "made way for other toys."

The song ended. The teacher inclined hands to the phonograph, to whisk the disk away for another.

"No!" we protested. "Play it again! Please!"

And this is what we said, every time the song ended. For a half hour, or maybe 45 minutes, we fingerpainted our dreams and hummed along to "Puff the Magic Dragon." I don't remember what precious masterpiece I painted that day, or whether it was brought home to Mom or posted on the corkboard bulletin board, but to this day "Puff" brings back the sharp smell of fingerpaint, the rustle of paper, the faint scritch-scritch-scritch of a well-played record, the flash of plaid and blue and red of classmates' clothes, and a patient teacher who understood a child's attachment to a timeless song.