Beryl Markham, My Good Friend

"Passed years seem safe ones, vanquished ones, while the future lives in a cloud, formidable from a distance. The cloud clears as you enter it. I have learned this, but like everyone, I learned it late.”              --Beryl Markham, West With The Night

When the world becomes frustrating or boring or petty, I go back to an old friend who I  know will not disappoint me. Over the years, some friends have grown old, and tiresome, but some continue to rescue me. 

Beryl Markham is one who has not grown old for me.  Her most wonderful memoir is West With the Night and like so many wonderful books, it begins with a wonderful opening:

"How is it possible to bring order out of memory? I should like to begin at the beginning , patiently, like a weaver at his loom. I should like to say, 'This is the place to start; there can be no other.' 

But there are a hundred places to start for there are a hundred names...Names are keys that open corridors no longer fresh in the mind, but nonetheless familiar in the heart."

And with that, she sucks me into Africa, where she grew up, and she tells her stories so effortlessly, so elegantly I am amazed every time I read them, no matter how many times I read them. 

I am not alone in this. 

I was lucky enough to have stumbled on her book when my sons were about seven and five and I read the whole thing to them, every page, a chapter at a time as their night time reading, one kid in the upper bunk the other in the bedside chair with me, and they loved it as much as I did.  We did a lot of books: Narnia, with its Christian stuff, Myths and Monsters, Where the Wild Things are, Shel Silverstein, but nothing quite sunk into us and bound us quite like Beryl Markham.

And now she's back, or I'm back, wrapped up in the magic of a book--touching and touched by an intelligence greater than my own, a friend I can call up any time, just by opening the covers. She never tires of me, never interrupts, and she is always available.

I don't read as much as I ought to. Never have.

But this is one of those pleasures which enriches life and gives it wonder, rapture even.

If you have kids--of any age, five to fifty, try reading this book to them, in bits, chapter by chapter. 

You'll have a new best friend for life.