Magical Child

Joseph Chilton Pearce, author of the Magical Child wrote the foreword for And the Skylark Sings with Me, so this morning I grabbed "magical child" off the shelf and began to read. It's a rare book where I read the preface. Sometimes I skim, but often the preface is really just a thank you note in disguise. Boring and full of pleasantries. This one is a real preface, an introduction, a visible background for the reader. A setting for Chapter One. At the bottom of page xii, Pearce writes, "I knew guilt over my own experience as a father and nostalgia over the loss of potential I had once felt so keenly." [emphasis added] Perhaps this is what Andy was feeling when he spoke of options narrowing as we grow older. The nostalgia over loss of potential.

My resistance to this book has been funny. Magical Child is a title that would almost draw me to read it under normal circumstances, but I have the same resistance to this book as I do to wearing Birkenstocks ~ My parents wore birks, and my mom read this book when my sibs and I were little. Random resistance. Seems silly in retrospect, but hey. I'm glad I'm finally reading. The hardest part of reading developmental books is as I read, I realize I've already made so many missteps with my own daughter.