All Aboard for Treasure Island

Jim and his mother just opened the captain's chest, took the rolled oil papers and bag of coins and escaped the Inn. The blind man's cane is tapping in the fog.

I tucked my son in and kissed his head.

"What do you think the papers are?" I asked.

"I don't know." His eyes, I am not exaggerating, are huge. He loves this story.

I have very different feelings for my youngest child. He is my youngest and a boy and that makes him very speical. And despite that he gets ignored the easiest. He is very easy going and feeds himself when he's hungry and puts himself to bed when he is tired. I have to make a conscious effort to spend time alone with him on things that interest him.

We read together every night. His sisters prefer to read by themselves now. He and I sit in his bed and it is our time alone together. He actually cried when we read about Laura and Mary riding away from the little cabin in Wisconson. He laughed at Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator. Treasure Island was his selection this time and we are both loving it.

The oiled papers of the Captain are of course the map. And I feel as if I can literally see the lines in his brain forming as he thinks about the story. His brain is making its own map as we read the story.

"Who did the Captain warn Jim about?" I ask him every night.

"The one legged man."

And when the one legged man shows up in the story? The child's brain is going to go crazy. I am convinced that a love and understanding of literature is the most important thing you can give a child. It's a map to Treasure Island, if you will.