Biblio-Biography

Some recent blogs I read have written about the sound-tracks of their lives and I thought it was an interesting idea. But then, I realized that I didn't really measure my life with music. My life has been defined more by books I read. They don't necessarily follow in a straight narrative, but some books have had a prominent place in my biography. Such as....

Misty of Chincoteague

I first read this book because it had a horse on the cover. I couldn't pronounce the name of the island when I was eight years old, but I was obsessed with horses and horse books. I lived on a farm, we had horses. But I was so frightened by them that I rarely enjoyed them. My sister and I were bucked off once when our horse took a pitching fit at the sound of the ice cubes clanking around in our lunch water bucket that was strapped to the saddle. I can still picture myself lying on my back under a piece of farm machinery seeing him bucking and gyrating just a few feet from my face, trying to get rid of that horrible sound the way he'd shed us two girls. So, reading horse books was much more soothing than my dad's real-live, real-frisky, real-big horses.

I cried when I read Misty. It was exciting and tender, and had nail-biting suspense. The end was triumphal and thrilling. I read the library copy three or four more times. Then, as an adult I found some beautiful copies of Misty in a store and bought my very own. I also got several other books by Marguerite Henry because all of her books were horse stories--real stories about real horses. Even though I'd had my own horse from age 12 till I left home after high school, and I'd broke him, and I wasn't afraid of horses anymore, and he was my good friend, I still couldn't read Misty without crying.

In my Navy wife home, I read one day in the San Diego paper that Marguerite Henry was appearing at a department store to sign her books. !!! So, I snatched up my books, and went down there and bought another copy of one of them (for my cousin, who shared my obsession) and stood in line with about 20 nine-year old girls (I was nearly 30 and had three tiny children not old enough to read this book to yet.) We were all so excited to meet our hero--the author of our favorite books. She knew the "Real Misty" and we were thrilled to be in her presence. I still keep my signed copy in a special place.

When those first three children grew old enough to understand it, I read Misty of Chincoteague to them. We'd sit on the couch each evening and read a chapter before bed. We got to the exciting Pony Swim chapter, and we just had to know what happened next, so we read an extra chapter that night. I read the book again, twice, to our next two children when they each reached that age to appreciate my literary treasure.

Then, I became a school teacher. In Maryland. To the East, in a straight line, across the Chesapeake Bay and the Eastern Shore, was Nine-year Girl Mecca: Chincoteague Island. Of course nothing is in a straight line if you're in Maryland. Only birds can travel in a straight line there. Everyone else must go up and around and down and around to travel across the maze of creeks and bays and inlets. But, after many years of reading Misty aloud to my students, I resolved to make the pilgrimage.

Many of my students had visited the two islands in the book. Assateague, the place of the wild things, is a National Seashore, and Chincoteague, a little island town, is where the people live. I even became friends with a woman who remembers going to the movie when she was a little girl and seeing the REAL Misty at the theater, at a fundraiser to help the pony herds that had been devastated by a hurricane.

Finally, Cool Guy and I made a trip over there. It was winter, but we saw ponies. We saw all the places that I'd read about in the book. I took home with me a handful of sand that I scooped up from a pony hoofprint, and a seashell from the beach. We saw Misty's hoofprints in the cement in front of the movie theater where the Misty Movie had premiered. We saw Pony Ranch. It was pretty close to Nirvana for me.

Then, I did the ultimate. Two summers later, I drove over on a July evening (about three hours from our home in Southern Maryland -- western shore) and just slept in my car in a parking lot at the beach. At dawn, I walked over to the water's edge and I wasn't the first person there, either. It was the most exciting day of summer: Pony Penning Day. If you haven't read the book, then you must to get a sense of what anticipation I was feeling that morning. For almost 40 years, I'd read about this event and finally, here I was, in person, to witness it myself. And it was totally worth it. Everything I'd read about, probably 15 times, was in living, breathing reality, right in front of me. The crowd had a preponderance of middle-aged women and nine-year old girls. The Misty people.

I followed the Salt Water cowboys and the herd to the fairgrounds. From the side of a corral filled with wet ponies, I called my cousin at her home in Arizona to tell her where I was. She was as thrilled as I knew she would be. Her youngest son was reading Misty that very week at his mother's suggestion as a cure for summer boredom. I mailed a T-shirt to my sister--her daughter was also a fan. I soaked it up and reveled in it for several hours, and finally got in my car to drive home, knowing that now I could die, having been to the site of my childhood obsession. It was a good day.

I still cry when I read Misty of Chincoteague.