Where My Mind Goes
Bedtime Stories
It is Halloween again. Although if you had been shopping at Costco in late July, you would have been confronted by racks of costumes and hundreds of pounds of Halloween candy. I am not a Halloweener. I don’t get excited about wearing costumes and I only succumb to the seasonal flavoring is for a piece of pumpkin pie at Thanksgiving.
Now, that is not to say that I don’t enjoy a good story of the macabre. I hesitate to say horror as I find the real horrors in life are played out by the Republicans and their adherence to anti-democratic practices as espoused by the Nazis in their Walpurgisnacht torch marches. No, for me there is a whole genre of macabre stories as written by the likes of Poe, Stoker, Bierce and Woolstencroft.
It is of course, in October when the powers of darkness are exalted. So, when the brambles and bracken begin to bronze, I turn back to the canon and pull out the immortal tale of The Hound of the Baskervilles.
Back when I had children who liked to spend time with their father and sat by my knee and listened to me read, each September 21st I would haul out my Annotated Sherlock Holmes and begin to read. My eldest daughter, now in self-imposed exile from me, loved to hear the Adventure of the Speckled Band. Something about a snake preying upon a sister seemed to resonate with her. She would sit in rapt attention as the tale of greed and murder played out. No Nancy Drew or Scooby Do for her. Even at seven or eight, there was no place for sanitized kid-lit for her.
So, when the harvest moon was full and the wind began to howl, I would begin the annual reading of the Hound. As I began the reading my daughters would snuggle closer to me. My recitation was slow and deliberate, allowing the syllables and my expression of them to carry the mood of the story. From a sunny sitting room in Baker Street to the wild moors of Devon, the followed. Sometimes they would have a question, and I would explain the text. But mostly, they sat and listened.
The Hound of the Baskervilles can easily be read in a single sitting, but I was not going to rush the process. The girls needed time to digest the story and I wanted them to be wide awake at the denouement. Like most kids, a scary story told at the fireside was a welcome distraction. I was playing to their imagination. Conan Doyle’s descriptions were all they had to go on, and yet it was enough.
Without the crutch of movies or TV, they could form an image of the characters, put themselves on a fog-shrouded moor, and saw the fangs of the hound dripping with phosphorescent evil. The story transferred from the author’s imagination to theirs and they were the better for it.
For several blessed years, they joined me in the annual reading, until their personalities and the effects of divorce pulled us apart. Still, I believe that in the case of my eldest girls, the reading made an impact on their minds. They took to reading and I believe that my introducing them to the process became a lasting gift.
