Week 38: Volvo P1800S

In fourth grade I read a fiction book about a Jewish family escaping from Nazi Germany. The title has long since evaporated from my memory pool, although I remember the cover was an illustration done in dark blues and black, and I remember I ordered it from the Tab or Troll Bookclub (where you ordered books by checking boxes on a newsprint flyer and you then waited in anticipation for the weeks to pass so that the teacher would get her big stack of books to pass out to the students).

That book introduced me to new ideas -- this was pre-Internet and cable television. I had never met a Jewish person in my small town upbringing, and if I knew about WWII, I'm sure my understanding was little more than a jumbled mix of unconnected pieces.

That blue-covered book, while written for children and without graphic mention of the actual horrors of that global conflict, nonetheless illustrated the realities of persecution, ethnic struggle and bravery from that time. I suspect the impact was heightened because the characters were children of my own age.

What I do remember of the story is one of the children characters had been well off before the conflict and had told the other character that her parents had owned a Volvo. I had never even heard the name Volvo before that book. I also learned what barbed wire was, after looking it up in my dictionary.

While I don't remember the storyline, for 38 years I've retained the feeling of that book, the sense of injustice, the bonds of friendship between the characters, and the mixture of hope and fear. The story is now more like an abstract painting of colors, or a garden of fragrances, real, but not in a linear, concrete sense.

Odd that I remembered one unimportant line about a Volvo. Maybe I was destined even then to one day write an obscure blog about toy cars, even if blogs didn't exist and the word "blog" would have sounded like a creature from one of the sci-fi books I usually read.

Even with the over-abundance of entertainment for kids today via Internet, gaming, cable and handhelds, I still believe the power of the written word should not be forgotten.

You might not know what part of a book will make an impression, and a child might not remember the ideas you would like, but if you provide children with a range of books and encourage them to read, they might read something of which one day they'll remember one line about a Volvo, retain a vague memory of a book cover, or develop the seeds of understanding that freedom is not free.



This blog is dedicated to the men and women, past and present, who serve, or have served, in the military, allowing myself, you and all our children the glorious freedom to read, smile and be inspired. 


Photograph of my Volvo courtesy of Phil Pekarcik -- my car is the red one.