Daniel relaxes with a little Tolstoy
It was 1963 and I was an 8th grader at St. Margaret’s Catholic School. It was the year that Peter, Paul and Mary were telling us that the answers were “Blowing in the Wind,” but unfortunately I had no idea what the questions were. Sister Philip Mary suggested that I might check the philosophy section at the Hartford County Library. In retrospect, she was probably only suggesting the likes of Thomas Aquinas and Augustine, but I fell first upon J.B. Philip’s text, “Your God is Too Small.” I panicked! If he’s right, I thought, I’m looking at some serious Purgatory time!
At Sister Philip Mary’s prodding, I continued to read. There was Kierkegaard, Sartre, Teilhard de Chardin, Camus, Kant, Dostoyevsky. You may be curious if I understood what I was reading…well…not exactly. I could always latch on to just one sentence with which to begin an after-school conversation though. Thus began my fascination with books…
So today, at Cherokee Creek, I still feed that facsination by helping our boys get their hands on the books they want to read. PaperbackSwap.com and book donations from parents and friends have allowed us to secure hundreds of books for our boys, newly awakened to the power of words and books. Hardly a day goes by that I do not receive a request for a book about pandas, or fly fishing, or WWII fighter jets, or card tricks—or a book by J.K. Rowling, or Gary Paulsen, or John Grisham, or Orson Scott Card. The possibilities are endless!
And just when I thought I had seen it all, picture this scene from last week: a boy comes up to my office and says, “Sharon, can you get me a book of short stories by Leo Tolstoy?” I’m telling you that my heart skipped a beat! Peter, Paul and Mary belted out lyrics in my psyche! And in my mind, Sister Philip Mary admonished me to take this lad seriously! And so seven days later, I was handing over Count Leo Tolstoy, one of the world’s greatest novelists, to an eager 13 year old. An observing colleague asked, “how much do you think he’ll understand?” “It doesn’t matter,” I responded, “I hope that a spark will ignite, and this young man will latch on to just one sentence…”
Cherokee Creek Boys School is a therapeutic boarding school for middle-school boys, ages 11-15, located in Upsate South Carolina.
