Shuffling a 90-year old deck
can deal a surprising hand

When I was in second grade I started piano lessons with a woman named Mrs. Pond. Her house in Grafton , Massachusetts, with its dark Victorian parlor was not far from the schoolyard, so I could walk there and then home after a private class. There is nothing much to the memory now besides a deck of cards that the teacher gave me, perhaps because I was sad. Our family was moving to New Hampshire and I did not want to go.

I still have her gift. The maroon cardboard box with the word AUTHORS is cracked and broken, but there are 41 surviving cards and a fragile set of instructions. Each card includes the oval portrait of an English or American author wrapped in laurel leaves. The date on the cover says 1897, but my edition is maybe 20 years older because the dates of more recently dead authors have been filled in. The cards were already old when I got them in 1959.

There may be no connection between the deck of cards and the fact that I majored in English Literature in college and went on to become a writer. But then again, there may be. I played with the cards a lot as a child, memorizing the works of the authors and their dates like other kids learned the stats on baseball cards. Shakespeare is here, Milton, Dryden, Shelly, Dickens, Poe, Pope. Some have faded from memory, like Bayard Taylor and Helen Hunt Jackson and General Lew wallace.

When I rediscovered the deck again in a box of kid stuff recently, I fanned the deck and thumbed the old familiar faces. I’ve typed a few million words of my own since those early piano days, many of them about my adopted home in Seacoast, New Hampshire. So I swooned a bit with surprise when I studied one long dead author pulled randomly from the deck – pick a card sonny, any card.

It was Celia Thaxter, the poet of the Isles of Shoals, an author almost unknown today beyond this tiny coastline. I own the distinction of being the only person on the Internet, so far, to dedicate a web site in her honor. IN a couple of weeks I’ll be staying, once again, in the rustic island house where Celia summered as a child – reading the ancient English writers that I too came to know. Hawthorne visited when Celia was still a girl. But later, herself a popular writer, Celia walked and dined with Dickens, Whittier, Emerson, Longfellow and Harriet Beecher Stowe. All are in my deck of cards.

There is a card for Thomas Bailey Aldrich as well, Portsmouth’s "bad boy" author of one truly enduring children’s book and the stuffy Victorian editor, for a decade of the Atlantic Monthly. And one card for his colleague William Dean Howells, another man of letters and a summer resident of Kittery, Maine.

So, almost magically, it appears, I had known these people as a child, sitting on my bed with the whole encyclopedia of authors splayed out in front of me. Then I lost them. But that is how it goes with great writers. They can go missing. They can disappear for decades like an old deck of cards or a favorite book -- then reappear – fresh with insights unknown to youth.