Hans Brinker or The Silver Skates - Mary Mapes Dodge

"On a bright December morning long ago, two thinly clad children were kneeling upon the bank of a frozen canal in Holland."

It is rare that I find myself willing to write about a book that I haven't even finished. In fact it is one of the cardinal sins of English Departments around the world (despite the fact that it happens daily by students and faculty alike). But this book holds a bit of a different significance for me than a great many in my collection. In fact this is one of those instances where the story within the book is overshadowed by the story of how I acquired it.

A great deal of the story you can glean from the quote below. The book is about children in Holland and they are cold. The main character's story, the story of Hans Brinker, is a classic bildungsroman told in the mode of a children's story. Hans is a poor child who skates around the canals of Holland on a poor boy's wooden skates. But eventually he is able to prove his worth in a skating contest in which he wins a pair of silver skates. This is as far as I ever got in the book and may not even be that entirely accurate. I stopped reading it mostly because my second semester of college was looming and the tale itself didn't carry quite as much appeal for a lad of nineteen than it might for a boy of ten.

But as I said, it was the acquisition of this volume that makes it a valuable piece in The Eastin Collection. When I was young my grandfather had a close friend named Addee. To this day I can't quite recall how we managed to gain her acquaintance but she was an elderly woman with a bright spirit. If I recall right she didn't have a great deal of family of her own and may, in fact, have never married at all. As a result she would often join my family during events or holidays. Each Christmas my sisters and I would receive a gift certificate from Addee (she had no other title than her first name). And my mother would always emphasize the importance of Thank You cards. Each year after Christmas we would faithfully write our Thank Yous to Addee, an act which, at that point, we did not understand the significance.

One year, instead of a gift certificate, Addee brought over this book. It was an old and yellowed volume even then but she handed it to me with a little sparkle in the corner of her wrinkled eye saying that she thought I might enjoy this book and that she had searched for it specifically. Looking back I feel slightly guilty for filling my childhood brain with Goosebumps instead of moral tales like this one but, so it goes.

Some years later Addee passed away suddenly and while we were sad that she would no longer be joining us for Christmas we soon learned the importance of common courtesies. I don't know many of the details but it had apparently been stipulated in Addee's will that a certain amount of her estate would be split between my sisters and I. It was by no means a large estate but it was the gesture that impacted us much more than the gift. To this day this little book, faded and musty as it may be, is a reminder of the importance of a simple Thank You even for simple gifts.
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Dodge, Mary Mapes. Hans Brinker or, The Silver Skates. Illus. Hilda Van Stockum. Cleveland, OH: The World Publishing Co., 1946.