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Bob King read The Yearling by Marjorie Rawling

When I was in the sixth grade my teacher began a tradition with her class of reading aloud to us after we returned from lunch. This is when my real interest in books began. We would return from the hustle and bustle of the cafeteria, and Miss Aronson would allow us to rest our heads in our folded arms on our desk while she would read to us. It became the favorite time of the day for the entire class. Miss Aronson could use the threat of “no reading today” when she needed to bring us back into line, and it was a technique that worked splendidly. We all loved the time she spent reading to us, and did nothing to jeopardize it. I can remember times when I would insist on going to school even if I wasn’t well simply because I just could not bear to miss the next installment in her reading.

We started the year off with Charlotte’s Web, followed by Stuart Little, which I enjoyed very much, but it was the last book of the year, Marjorie Rawling’s The Yearling that had a profound impact upon me. This was my first real novel. There were no talking animals. This was serious, real life stuff, and all of us in Miss Aronson’s sixth grade classroom were absolutely spellbound. It was the story of a girl about our age who lived with her family scratching a living off the land in the Florida everglades. One day she is out hunting with her father and it is only after they shoot a deer that they realize it was with a fawn. Jodi begs her father to allow her to take the fawn as a pet, and finally, against his better judgment, he allows her to take “Flag” home with them.

As the story unfolds, we learn what a hard life these people live. From the perspective of modern day middle class kids, Jodi and her family seem almost like pioneers. They are very poor, but also very proud, and although they have virtually no money, their life as a family is happy and loving. Their life was nothing like our own. They had many trials and challenges in their subsistence off the land, and it made us all think about how much easier our own lives were. We would have just returned from a nice hot lunch, and then hear about Jodi and her family’s struggle to just survive, and it made us think about how our own lives compared with those experiences. I would lie in bed at night and imagine what it was like to live on the everglades, hunting for food, and raising so much of what you ate from your own garden. I began to understand that reading could do more than just entertain, but could transport us to other places and times, and allow us to put ourselves within the life experiences of other people, just as if they were our own.

Eventually the reasons for Jodi’s dad having reservations about taking a deer as a pet begin to reveal themselves to us. Trying to control Flag and his natural instincts as he begins to grow older and get bigger becomes increasingly more difficult for Jodi. Finally, after Flag has got himself into the family vegetable plot and nearly ruined all the crops, Jodi’s dad must warn her that because he threatens their very existence, Flag will have to be destroyed if it happens again. We know the prospect breaks his heart; he blames himself for ever allowing Jodi to keep the deer. He knows how much she loves her pet, but this is a matter of survival, and he realizes, as does Miss Aronson’s sixth grade classroom, it cannot end well.

On the day we arrived back from lunch to hear the final chapters of The Yearling, Miss Aronson explained that today we could keep our heads down at the end of the story for a little while longer than usual. She also shut the lights off that day, and encouraged us to “just rest a little” when the story was finished. She knew we would all be crying and wanted to save us any embarrassment.

I cried myself to sleep that night. I was so shocked and disappointed in how unfair life could be. This was pretty heavy stuff for a sixth grader, and I just couldn’t stop thinking about that book. It was such a significant experience for me that it opened up the world of reading for me, and showed me how powerful books could be. I think I grew up a bit that year, thanks my sixth grade teacher Miss Aronson, and her selection of Marjorie Rawling’s The Yearling.

Bob King is a restauranteur in Sandwich.