Some stories stick with you and you carry them around inside
for the rest of your life. One of those for me was The Call of the Wild, Set in the Yukon, it tells the story of Buck,
a sled dog. The author, Jack London, takes the reader inside Buck’s experiences
of human cruelty, as well as human love and kindness.
When I was in the fifth grade, our little school library
sponsored a contest, to be judged (as I recall) by the librarian. To enter, you
had to draw a picture of your favorite book. I am a terrible artist when it
comes to drawing anything realistic. But The
Call of the Wild made such a deep impact on me, I wanted to represent it
somehow. The book had choked me up. So I drew a tube with red and blue pastels.
It was supposed to be a human windpipe, although there was no way to tell that from my
drawing. Instead, it was basically two parallel vertical lines with a circular blockage
in the middle (like an Adam’s apple). Half was red, half blue, representing the
powerful emotions the book generated in me.
I suppose that it might have stood out simply for being more abstract
than any other contest entry. I mean, I was competing with amazing pictures of
horses in meadows, race cars. And then there was my pastel red and blue picture
of . . . something.
The results were read in class and I’ll never forget it when
the teacher said, “And the first prize award goes to—I’m so surprised!—Philip.”
I think my powerful feeling for that book must have been communicated with my rough
abstract.
I’ve carried a compassion for dogs throughout my entire
life. I just finished writing a novel, and a dog is one of the main characters
in the story. I never connected that back to The Call of the Wild—until I started thinking about it while
writing this blog entry. But the dog in my own story, Linc, has been maimed and
abandoned. Cruelty. He’s healed and adopted by Dara, who possesses a special
healing armlet. Kindness. It’s also a story of survival and that’s one of the
main themes of The Call of the Wild.
The stories we carry inside us come out in all sorts
of unexpected ways. They resonate and can last a lifetime.
What books or stories do you still carry inside you?
