My co-worker is pregnant with her first child and I’m spending the summer grabbing the last minutes I can with my kids who are off to college in the fall.  The timing of this has me thinking about the “children’s books years” that lie between these 2 life events. 

Mine is a family of collectors and keepers, so when I knew I was pregnant, I immediately went to my mom’s house and grabbed all my favorite childhood books to read to my new baby.  Over the years, I also added many, many new books to the family collection, and most of them are now in my sister’s house for her kids.  I say most of them because I couldn’t let go of some of my favorites and wanted to ensure that they would be available to my kids to read to their children.

I’ve held on to favorites like: “Are You My Mother?”, “Ferdinand the Bull”, “Sylvester and the Magic Pebble”, “I Lost my Bear”, and onward to “A Wrinkle in time”, “Holes”, “the BFG” and “To Kill a Mockingbird”.   The list of books I’ve held on to, frankly, goes on and on – I guess I’m a collector and keeper like my mom. 

Books are definitely a connecting thread in my family, weaving through siblings, cousins, parents, and generations.  I can’t really explain the immeasurable joy I feel when I share my actual copy of a favorite book with my kids, or when I see one of our favorite books being read by my father to his grandkids.  We all feel like we are handling “treasure”, and of course, we are.

Don’t let your books collect dust in a box somewhere, bring them out into the daylight and have them light up someone’s imagination.  Pass them on to a pregnant friend, a kid at a local high-need school, an under-funded library – let these “treasures” do their job.
 
Gayle Baigelman
Associate Director, BookEnds