DON'T PANIC - THIS POST ISN'T WHAT YOU MIGHT THINK IT IS...

Copyright relevant owner

I know what you're all thinking - "Kid's gone loopy and is now going to preach to us."  No, not at all - there will be no religious content in this post about what you should believe, how you should live, or anything else pertaining to the subject of theology.  The only reason I've used the above picture is because there's a story behind it; not much of one I grant you, but, hey - I have to fill this blog with something, otherwise you'd have nothing to read.

There was a time when I was a teenager that I became interested in religion.  I think at some stage in all our lives we go through the "Who am I?, Where did I come from?, Why am I here?, Where am I going?" phase and it was no different for me.  Some of us investigate it and some of us shrug it off, but I think those questions chap at the door of our minds at some point or other if we have any degree of intelligence.  So I investigated for a while, and reached my own conclusions, none of which I'll bore you with (you'll be glad to hear).

However, the preceding preamble is just to set the stage for this book - or to be more precise, its cover.  Back in the late '70s, a friend at the time lent me a copy of this book.  He was no longer living in my home town, and I assume that he wouldn't have bothered to bring it all the way up from down South on one of his infrequent visits, so I suspect it resided in his sister's house (who did still live in my home town at the time) and that was where he acquired it to lend to me.  Whether it was actually his to lend is another matter, though it could well have been.

Anyway, there was a chapter which interested me, so I lent the book to a minister I knew to ask his opinion about it.  (I think I asked my friend if it was okay to do so, but I couldn't swear to it.)  When, after a suitable period, I enquired after its return, he'd 'mislaid' it, leaving me to explain to my pal what had happened.  He expressed disappointment, because, he said, it had belonged to his mother and father who were by then both deceased, but he wasn't angry about it.  His parents were Baptists, so I was surprised that they'd own a Seventh-day Adventist book, but maybe it had been lent to them by someone and not returned.  (If so, that seemed to have become a habit.)  Of course, there's always a chance that he was lying about it being his parents' book just to make me feel guilty.  He was that kind of guy.

Anyway, in the course of time, I eventually cut this particular friend loose because of his tendency to tell whopping-great lies of a humongously absurd nature, but being the nostalgist that I am, I still think back fondly to the time of our childhood and teenage years when we were yet pals.  Which is odd, I suppose, because I wouldn't cross the road to pee on him now if he were on fire.  Anyway, it was only in the last few days, while browsing through eBay, that I noticed that this book was written by the same author (Arthur S. Maxwell) as the Bedtime Stories book I've owned from my earliest days, so I bought one just for old times' sake.

Why?  There was always something about the cover that fascinated me; the cozy 'home and hearth' scene of domestic bliss, peace and tranquillity, that spoke to me of what life could and should be like.  My image of how the world should look is based on Ladybird book illustrations of the '50s and '60s, and the cover and internal illos are of a similar nature, so how could I fail to be entranced by them?  There's more to it than that, though.  The cover also reminds me of a vanished time, a former friend, and my deceased youth, which crept away to die without me noticing, while I erroneously believed it was still alive and very much a current companion.  (I just turned around to look at it one day and found that it was gone.)

So now I have one more aspect of the 'long-ago' back in the fold, another part of my past to warm me as the already far too rapidly advancing winter of my life seems to speed up its approach.  Hopefully, though, it'll take a lengthy 'pit-stop' on the way.

Do any of you Crivvies remember (or yet own) any books with illustrations that evoke fond memories of happier times, or which, when younger, pointed forwards to happy days as you'd like them to be?  Tell all in the comments section.