Gifts for a Millennial Hope Chest

1899--The Last Fin-de-Siecle is remembered as a time when people partied as if there were no tomorrow. But my own millennial image comes from a story I read as a child. A group of young people is distraught at a newspaper announcement that the world will end at 2:00 p.m. on Sunday. How they wonder and worry! They make amends, give away cherished possessions, don their best clothes as Ascension Dress, and wait for the trumpet to sound. When, in splendid anti-climax, nothing happens, the world does not end, they feel relieved, but they also feel rooked, the victims of a hoax, gullible geese who have fallen for media hype.

The Judgment Day vigil is described in The Story Girl by L. M. Montgomery ( http://www.upei.ca/~lmmi/core.html ) who also wrote the Anne of Green Gables ( http://www.gov.pe.ca/lucy/ ) and Emily of New Moon (http://www.tv.cbc.ca ) series. The Story Girl is Sara Stanley, a character immortalized by Canadian actor Sarah Polley ( http://www.saturdaynight.ca/1999_10/inde... ) in the long-running series Road to Avonlea. Anne Shirley, the orphan of Green Gables, and Sara Stanley, who is motherless, are kindred spirits.

The orphan motif in Montgomery's writings has an autobiographical hook. Lucy Maud, whose mother died before L.M. was two years old, was raised by her maternal grandparents on a farm at Cavendish, Prince Edward Island. However, feeling orphaned and abandoned is also a psychological truth with which readers around the world identify. Montgomery's heroes are female and they start out alone. Most were born very close to 1899, in a very specific place. The Prince Edward Island landscape is as alive as any character in the books. L. M.'s heroes, even if adopted, choose to be part of a loving extended family who share a history. They are intimately involved in the intellectual, economic, social, and spiritual life of their larger community. They are imaginative, creative, optimistic, often skilled at recitation, acting, or writing, and natural leaders. They are keenly observant, intimately involved in the miraculous of everyday. Proactive participants in the quest for adventure, they each embrace their responsibility for living well. Although the rural setting seems idyllic now, the psychology of childhood still rings true. The fears and fights and cruelties are all there, as are questions of values, patterns of conflict resolution, and subtle role modeling.

My first edition L.M. Montgomery (published in 1911) was a gift from my Great Aunt Beatrice Hamilton from Golden, BC. Although I met her only once, when I was nine years old, I am still grateful that she chose The Story Girl for me. Another precious book I keep from my childhood is even older. Guy's Geography, a school textbook, belonged to one of my beloved grandmothers when she was a student in Ilminster, Somerset, England. In faint brown ink on the inside cover I can still read her schoolgirl signature, written over top the names of many others who had owned the book before her. Hilda Woodland. Already about ninety years old when my Grandma used it, Guy's Geography, in the chapter on North America, says there are twenty states in the Union, with Illinois becoming a State "in the last session of Congress." (1818) The text also lists George IV, who reigned from 1820 to 1830, as King of England. Its pages are browned and spotted and some of the foldout maps are ripped, but I love leafing through this book. Not only is it a snapshot of the world in 1820, it also holds the memory of a real girl destined to become part of my own life.

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