Was it weird to wish I could turn into a forever-bubbling spring (like Arethusa) or a shining-leaved tree (like Daphne)? I liked how overpowering emotions guided every mythological action and reaction: cockeyed desires strung together risk and longing, manipulation and capture. I also drank in the Steele Savage illustrations (a 1970 reviewer in The Classical Outlook: “The illustrations are strikingly beautiful, although they bear a closer relationship to Fantasia than to anything Greek”). They concluded with limited lover visitation or a harassed gal being turned into a linden tree. In the weeks, months, and years after the slender book became mine, I read and reread the stories of love and adventure that Hamilton rendered so wryly: Cupid and Psyche, Pyramus and Thisbe, Orpheus and Eurydice, Pygmalion and Galatea. Somehow, the absent figure is the most affecting, a myth unto himself. Social scientists work to get dads more involved because research indicates that fathers’ involvement in their child’s early education is correlated not only with academic success but also with improved overall well-being. ![]() As with most US children, my mother was more involved in my educational development than my father. ![]() As with most US children who attend public schools, the majority of my instructors were female. The scene sticks with me, I think, because so many of my earliest memories involve women teaching me to read and men assigning me things to read. When I was ten, he handed me a paperback copy of Edith Hamilton’s Mythology: Timeless Tales of Gods and Heroes (1942) and said, “All educated people know mythology.” I took the book and ran upstairs, where I immediately wrote my name and the date in ballpoint pen on the inside cover, as if the ink was an incantatory potion that would launch me to the ranks of the educated. He was a deeply kind person who saw in our Erskine Caldwell clan something worth salvaging from the fate otherwise predicted by demographics. Growing up, my family had a patron: an artist who gave us his used Dodge Dart when my mom’s job took her off a bus line and who sometimes handed me five-dollar bills at the end of his visits to our house.
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