During the seventeenth century, Massachusetts was the vanguard of Christian orthodoxy. During the eighteenth century, Virginia was the centerpiece of the providential work of God in preparing liberty-loving leaders. During the nineteenth century, Texas was the gathering spot for the heartiest men on the planet.

God has blessed me with the privilege of living in all three of these states. I was born in Boston, but soon became a repatriated Virginian where I enjoyed the glories of the Old Dominion for more than a quarter of a century. Texas is now and will likely be my home for the rest of my life. It is a manly, large, rugged state with an uncommonly high population of sturdy Christian folk.

As a boy, however, I returned to the commonwealth of my birth to spend summers on Cape Cod in one of two quiet little homes by the water. The first home was in South Dennis and belonged to my father’s parents. It was just a cottage, but simply glorious. These were lazy, luxurious boyhood days filled with summer reading, sandy beaches, and periodic sunburns. My grandfather rose early and made me “everything but the kitchen sink” omelettes for breakfast. When Grandma (who we called “Gigi”) was not looking, he would regularly slip me a few dollars to buy candy at an old fashioned drug store. I would fish for flounder by day, and sleep on the porch at night.

The second Cape Cod home was on large lake. This summer home belonged to my mother’s parents. It was shared annually with my many cousins, aunts, and uncles. The lake home was a mysterious home. There were secret nooks and crannies to discover, and wild animals lurking in the forest behind. It set back on the hill next to a forest filled with the type of paths that always lead a boy to secret treasure. Old bottles, animal skeletons, and long abandoned forts from ancient civilizations (or at least the time of our grandparents’ childhood) were hidden deep in the woods. One day, when I was eight years old and exploring the forest, I stepped on a piece of glass which went right through my foot and landed me in the hospital. I have never been comfortable walking barefoot on anything but a beach since then.

Down the hill from the lake home we had a private beach with our own dock. We jumped off that dock ten thousand times over the course of a summer, and often rowed the little rowboat into the middle of the lake in search of fresh catfish.

I remember as if it were yesterday the afternoon when I took our little dingy far into the lake, far beyond sight of our beach. I was at that point when a boy decides that it is time to stop rowing and time to start napping, when I startled to the most unusual sight. There heading towards my vessel at what appeared to be full speed, was a very large beaver. On closer inspection, the beaver turned out to be my dog Rusty who had broken free of her dog chain and swam for thirty minutes half way across the lake in search of her master. Over the course of her fourteen year life, Rusty would prove her fidelity in a hundred ways, coming to my aid when challenged by neighborhood bullies, and once even taking a 22. bullet from one of them. But it was the day at the lake that taught me a perspective on loyalty and devotion unique to that special breed of animals which have rightly earned the moniker “man’s best friend.”

Over the years I have read many thousands of books, but I wonder if reading has ever been as sweet an experience as during those lazy summer afternoons. I remember with a twinge of sadness for the Cape Cod which once was and is no more, the old fashioned one-room library down the street from our South Dennis home. I still remember the smell of that building. (The smell of old hardbacks is one of the happiest odors on earth.)

Mom let me check out about three or four books a week. I devoured them with passion. One year, Mom introduced me to the Freddy the Pig series by Walter Brooks. That summer Freddy became my ever present companion. When I had exhausted the library of all her Freddy books, mom and I would search far and wide for copies of the missing volumes.

I thought of all these things this weekend, as my family and I gathered in our living room to sit at the feet of my mother who for four and a half hours uninterrupted read aloud for her grandchildren the entire volume of Freddy and the Football Game. My children laughed, cooed, giggled, and rejoiced. So did I.

Once again, I got to be a boy sitting beside the mother of my youth. My mother — the master connoisseur of childhood literature — who to this day continues to give each of us a love for reading happy books and for good old fashioned fun.

No, Freddy is not Augustine. He is not Bunyan. But he is a very interesting pig who was once part of my childhood, and is now a part of my children’s lives. For that, and for the blessing of having a mother with a multigenerational vision for the love of literature, I am thankful. I am content.