I activated my German Shepherd yesterday. There's a bit of history behind his name.
We lived between two small libraries when I was small; the big central Cranston library on Sockanossett Road had not been built yet. Both of these tiny libraries were about a mile and a half away. Since my mom didn't drive and thus we didn't have a second car, I didn't get to either very often until I was old enough to walk the distance, unless I could persuade my dad to put off his Saturday bowling for an hour or two to take me there. I borrowed most of my books from the school libraries.
The Auburn Library was in a storefront next to our bank on Rolfe Street, near City Hall and the high school. They had newer books, but a very small childrens/young adult department. The Arlington Library was up on Cranston Street, going toward the Narragansett brewery. It was an old brick building next to an older wood frame structure, the Hamilton Building, which had once been a school. I got most of my polio boosters at the Hamilton Building, before it burned down and was replaced with an uninteresting modern building.
Arlington had two stories. Upstairs was the adults' library while the childrens' books were downstairs. Today we would not recognize it as being for kids: it was dark and quite adult; no bright colors or murals or plastic tables and chairs. The wooden tables, chairs and shelving were all of dark wood in a room with low lighting (no fluorescents here!).
Today I would give a lot for the old books that were in that downstairs room at Arlington. Possibly they had bound St. Nicholas or Wide Awake issues down there; I know they had the entire collection of Thornton W. Burgess' "Old Mother West Wind" books about forest animals, which I read because I was crazy about anything having to do with animals. I read books about people only reluctantly; I read books like Roller Skates, Little Women, etc. only as I got older. What I wanted to read back then was Walter Farley and Marguerite Henry and Jack O'Brien and Jim Kjelgaard—and Arlington, I remember complaining bitterly to my mother, had books so old that the newest of them had a girl driving a car with a running board! (I was quite scornful about this!)
However, one of the books, despite it being printed in 1931, met with my approval: it was called Flax: Police Dog and I loved it. I did not sound as if it had been written by an American author; I thought it was translated from the German until I did some research on the internet some years ago and found out it was from the Swedish instead.
So I thought it quite natural and proper that my German Shepherd be named after that hero of my youth.
Yesterday, I also found Flax: Police Dog available at a reasonable price from a bookseller in Germany, via ABEbooks.com, so I ordered it. We'll see if re-reading as an adult will be as engrossing, especially since I am now an aficionado of old books.
A Name from the Past
