The first time I opened a Betsy-Tacy book, I was flabbergasted. Gripping the cover, I stared and stared at the words. Here was an author who saw into my deepest self, who knew exactly how I felt.
“Going on ten seemed to be exactly the right age for having fun,” she wrote. I read the words over and over.
The book was Betsy and Tacy Go Over the Big Hill, by Maud Hart Lovelace. The year was 1956. I was nine, going on ten.
Twenty-four years later I rediscovered Betsy, Tacy, and Tib in a small bookstore in a corner of Grand Central Station. It was mid-January and I had just moved to New York from the West Coast. I felt lost and alone in a strange city. Meeting Betsy and Tacy again was like finding old friends. I wasn't alone after all.
For some reason I had never read the Betsy-Tacy high school stories, as a child. Perhaps the library in the small mid-western town where I grew up didn't own them. Or maybe I just didn't look far enough. But now, twenty-four years later, I submerged myself in Betsy's high school world, the one I wished had been my own. One book after another unrolled before me like a richly textured carpet. But when I closed Betsy and the Great World, I found myself tottering on the edge of great void—I couldn't locate the last book in the series, Betsy's Wedding. The bookstore said the book was out of stock. The publisher said it was out of print.
One of the many things I love about the Betsy-Tacy books is how, read consecutively, they convey the shape and texture of a real life with its uneven terrain, its moments of illumination, its struggles. But Betsy's life, so vividly evoked, was unfinished and incomplete for me without the last book! I had to find Betsy's Wedding and bring the long story to its intended close.
I turned to the New York Public Library. Eureka! There was one copy of Betsy's Wedding—in the Staten Island Branch. I called immediately and reserved it. But I couldn't bear to wait for the machinery of the New York Public Library system to grind into motion. I would take the ferry to Staten Island and get the book myself.
On a gray, misty day in early March, I made the trip, watching impatiently as the ferry plowed through the cold, choppy waters. Couldn't the engines go any faster? What if someone else took out my Betsy book first? What if the Staten Island branch burned down before I got there? I might never get to read Betsy's Wedding! When we finally docked, I ran all the way to the library.
I didn't open the book until I was on the ferry again, headed back across the bay. Even then I hesitated, holding the book tightly in my lap. Betsy's Wedding was the last in the series—the end of the line. When I finished it, there would be no more new Betsy-Tacy adventures to discover, no mysterious turnings in the “Winding Hall of Fate”. But at last, sitting on the hard ferry bench, my face wet with foam, I began reading.
“Almost choked with excitement and joy, Betsy Ray leaned against the railing as the S.S. Richmond sailed serenely into New York City's inner harbor,” I read. “The morning was misty, and since they had passed through the Narrows, she had seen only sky and water—and a gull, now and then…”
I looked up at a gull swooping over the gray water. This was New York, 1980. In a few years my future husband and I would visit Mankato and talk to some of the folks who remembered the real Betsy Ray. But for now the future was unknown and the present rapidly receding. It was 1919, and I was a young woman returning from a long voyage, and anxious for her first glimpse of New York.
I smiled to myself and went on reading.
“My heart is turning home again, and there I long to be…”