An excerpt from my evening reading

Those of you not familiar with the Penrod stories by Booth Tarkinton are missing a wonderful glimpse into boyhood. Penrod is a twelve year old boy in the early 1900's, but he could easily be any boy in 2009. It's hilarious. I'm borrowing Mom's "Penrod: His Complete Story" and have found all kinds of gems in it. I've read all or nearly all these stories before and our family makes reference to them often; they are timeless. Here's some from the chapter "A Model Letter to a Friend" in which Penrod realizes the morning the assignment is due he has no such letter to turn in to class. He happens to notice his 19 year old sister's desk as he walks by her room. On it is a letter. He grabs it and closes it in one of his schoolbooks, never bothering to read it until his teacher calls on him in class to read "his" letter aloud. Agony. :)


On Monday Morning Penrod's faith in the coming of another Saturday was flaccid and lustreless. Those Japanese lovers who were promised a reunion after then thousand years in separate hells were brighter with hope than he was.On Monday Penrod was virtually an agnostic.
Nowhere upon hi shining morning face could have been read any eager anticipation of useful knowledge. Of course he had been told that school was for his own good; in fact, he had been told and told and told, but the words conveying this information, meaningless at first, assumed, with each repetition, more and more the character of dull and unsolicited insult.
He was wholly unable to imagine circumstances, present or future, under which any of the instruction and training he was now receiving could be of the slightest possible use or benefit to himself; and when he was informed that such circumstances would frequently arise in his later life, he but felt the slur upon his coming manhood and its power to prevent any such unpleasantness.
If it were possible to place a romantic young Broadway actor and athlete under hushing supervision for six hours a day, compelling him to bend his unremittent attention upon the city directory of Sheboygan, Wisconsin, he could scarce be expected to respond genially to frequent statement that the compulsion was all for his own good. On the contrary, it might be reasonable to conceive his response as taking the form of action, which is precisely the form that Penrod's smouldering impulse yearned to take.

And I love this part:

To Penrod, school was merely a state of confinement, envenomed by mathematics. . . .He must always be prepared to avoid incriminating replies to questions that he felt nobody had a real and natural right to ask him. And when his gorge rose and inwards revolted, the hours became a series of ignoble misadventures and petty disgraces strikingly lacking in privacy.

My friends with boys would probably really identify with these stories. You just gotta read 'em.


(There's a picture post after this one that I wrote earlier today.)