Eric Wasserman

A Lifelong Treasure

There is a wonderful line I identify with near the beginning of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe in which the narrator says, “Being the third son of the family, and not bred to any trade, my head began to be filled very early with rambling thoughts.” As the third of four children in an enormous family I didn’t exactly feel special as a little boy. Also, I was a child who struggled in school from dyslexia and was placed in special education classes until the middle of the seventh grade. Reading was definitely no pleasure back then. What I did have going for me was an imagination.

The reader in our family was my oldest brother, Todd. I recall a family vacation to Lake Chelan and seeing Todd reading Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson. I was not a reader at the time. I was a boy obsessed with going to the movies and reenacting the plots I loved. My father was one of the first people in our neighborhood to buy a VCR and often recorded movies for us that played on television. One that I loved was the 1950 Walt Disney version of Treasure Island. I remember breaking one of my mother’s brooms in half and attempting to fasten it to my knee with duct tape to play the part of Long John Silver in my playtime fantasies. Treasure Island is one of the first books I read by choice. I read it for two reasons; I knew I liked the story from the movie and I wanted to be like my oldest brother who excelled in school and did not have dyslexia.

Coming from a big family, I had built in playmates, but the truth is that I spent a lot of time by myself imagining stories and acting them out. One of the places I would do that was Highland Forest. Had my mother known I was riding my bicycle into the forest and setting off to play out adventures she would have grounded me until puberty. In that special place I believed I really was Jim Hawkins in Treasure Island. And when the adventures Stevenson put to the page ran out, I created my own because I didn’t want them to end. Alone there in Highland Forest, lost within my own imagination and the world of stories, I found a way to feel special. I would run about the trees singing “Fifteen men on the dead man’s chest— / Yo ho ho, and a bottle of rum!” having no idea what rum was at that age, but Coca Cola would do just fine to play the part. I was a suburban boy dreaming inside boy’s adventures. Like so many places of my childhood, Highland Forest is no longer there. But my imagination is still there among the vanished trees, believing I am living within a story.

When I went on my honeymoon to Scotland I took a copy of Stevenson’s Kidnapped. As I read it on the plane I simply could not imagine a fictional David Balfour. As I read, “I” was David Balfour and Highland Forest was Scotland. I was once again a little boy finding a way to feel special through reading. The Writers’ Museum in Edinburgh has a special Robert Louis Stevenson exhibit. In one of the security protected glass cases is a copy of the first printing of Treasure Island. While there, I stood and looked at it and thought of being that little boy who didn’t feel special who read a book and slipped into the world of the imagination. A book had opened a new door to my life and as a newly married man I was opening another. The once little boy with dyslexia found his life in the special gift of reading was staring at one of the seeds.