Books were not the only thing that mystified me when I was a child. My father’s dry Irish sense of humor mystified me greatly. Most mornings at breakfast he would greet me, his voice lilting with his best brogue: “Nahncy, did ye hear the big trrrruck in the middle o’ the night?” I never had, and even in our quiet neighborhood, what was so remarkable about a midnight truck? But my father’s owlish question made me wonder about the big truck in the middle of the night, made me try to stay awake to experience the big truck in the middle of the night, made “the middle o’ the night” a mysterious time in which loomed huge, shadowy trucks of unknown significance. I did not yet know the word “symbol,” but the big truck in the middle of the night became symbolic to me of some immense adult mystery.

It’s no wonder that many of the books I read affected me the same way, because books were an extension of my parents, like gardening tools, cooking pots, and other things that simply came with the house. To this day I have no idea where we got all the books; there were no bookstores. But I wandered vaguely among the bookshelves in our home, reading whatever attracted me, and I continue to reread some of those books even now: the ones that still mystify me with hints and intimations, a sense of wonder, a sense of immense mystery beyond my mundane understanding.

One is THE WIND IN THE WILLOWS by Kenneth Grahame, especially the parts about the Wild Wood and the stoats and weasels. Lo, half a century later, for my forthcoming suspense novel, DRAWN INTO DARKNESS, I have named the villain Stoat. But even more mystifying than the Wild Wood were the River and -above all - the Piper at the Gates of Dawn. He cast a lifelong spell of wonder on me. The very same piper shows up in another favorite, THE CROCK OF GOLD by James Stephens, along with leprechauns and cracked kettles of wisdom exponentially beyond any Irish magic I’ve encountered elsewhere except in the poetry of William Butler Yeats.

Another book that mystified me was MY NAME IS ARAM by William Saroyan, which enthralled me with the uncertainties of the cooking of rice and the inexplicable summer of the beautiful white horse. (Saroyan? In retrospect, I realize my parents must have had a remarkably good library.) And maybe the strongest spell of all was cast by Rudyard Kipling’s THE JUNGLE BOOK – the original, not that awful Disney travesty. That anyone could take such potent, dark prose poetry and turn it into tum-tiddley monkeyshines is literary blasphemy and abomination to me.

Q: Don’t you like baseball, hot dogs, apple pie and Disney?
A: I’m diabetic.
Q: Do you like Kipling?
Yes, I kippled a lot. Another of Kipling’s mystifying works was PUCK O’ POOK’S HILL. I had not yet learned about pookas, but my impression at the time was that Puck might be a distant relation of the Piper at the Gates of Dawn. Not too far off, for a ten-year-old.

Just because I first encountered them as a child does not mean I consider any of these titles to be children’s books. I recommend them without reserve to readers of all ages, and that endorsement includes BAMBI, by Felix Salton. Even as a kid I recognized the extraordinary quality of Salton’s writing, and I discovered in his storytelling a mystic, shiversome immensity for which I had no words – not back then. Even now I’m not sure whether to call it fate, destiny, doom or transcendence. The Disney version of BAMBI may be appealing in its own way, but it is to the book as a My Pretty Pony is to Pegasus.

*huff, sigh*

I suppose I was a bit of an oddball child. I did not like TV or movies, especially not you-know-whose. And once past kindergarten age, I did not believe in the Tooth Fairy, the Easter Bunny, or Santa Claus. But I did believe in the big trrrruck in the middle o’ the night.

And decades later, I saw it. Really, truly. Its roar awoke me at two in the morning. It shook the house; it shook the world. I ran downstairs and out onto my porch to see it impending, taking Main Street, Dallastown, PA by inches, a 72-wheeled monster made of yellow girders, its diamond-shaped trailer possessing the pavement from curb to curb as it advanced at two miles per hour. One bellowing truck-tractor pulled while another pushed, and on the steel platform between them loomed the load, a monolithic concrete cylinder so immense the stoplight wires had to be pulled up to let it through. Men in coveralls drove the pushmipullyu trucks, rode in glass boxes on the corners of the diamond, and strode alongside to guide the behemoth past my house while it rattled the bedrock.

What was it? Where was it going? I still don’t know. Okay, really, all those mornings of my childhood, Dad was just teasing my mother about her snoring. But that doesn’t matter. The big truck in the middle of the night continues to mystify me.