Working on Recovery

If a support group formed for my addiction, I would have to go first, “My name is Virginia, and I am a workaholic.”

In a car trip with a friend, I carried my cross stitching. When she questioned why I didn’t relax and enjoy the view, I admitted that I never even watched TV without a task in hand. She said I had missed the meaning of “relax” and offered to give lessons. Retirement from teaching has only brought a different kind of work – writing, volunteering, needlework, gardening – and a tad of housework.

My husband Al thought a bucket list of visiting the 50 states might help. He  settles down to watch the scenery out the window, stroll through a museum, or wander around some gardens. I pull out my pencil and stenopad, taking notes for the trip journal – not that far removed from the work I do. And there are the story ideas that pop up in a chance remark, a tale by the tour guide, or a quip on a poster. It’s hard to escape when your workplace is in your head.

Hearing a lot of advice that we actually need time to re-create as we recreate brought me to thinking seriously about my problem and looking for something that would enforce off-task time. Recently at the local cancer center where Al was being treated [successfully] for self-inflicted sun damage to his bald head, I noticed they had jigsaw puzzles out on several tables for patients and their waiting support groups. Presumably this helped them relax and think about something beside the treatments. I remembered that concentration on shapes and colors does tend to take one’s mind away from everyday concerns – a lesson I learned when I was young and practiced through three generations of female relatives. I hadn’t thought about it lately.

Mama kept a puzzle going for the lady who show up regularly wanting to gossip. Mama didn’t hold with gossipping and soon had the lady talking instead about where that curiously shaped puzzle piece was that “should go right there.”

My sister Beth and I put aside our constant quarrelling for a jigsaw puzzle. I worked the ground, and she worked the sky. She had a better eye for tiny differences in blue shades.

My teen-aged daughter Anna and I perfected the skill and made our rules. We never settled for a puzzle less than 1,000 pieces, and we had a system. First you turn all the pieces right side up making sure none are still joined and removing the edge pieces. Then you put the edge pieces together for the outline. Only then do you begin to work on the puzzle. [Parenting hint: If you want to make a comfortable setting for your child to talk, a jigsaw puzzle will do it.] We also put a curse on those who thought it was a good practical joke to remove just one piece of the puzzle.

Just in case you thought I had forgotten where I was going with this, I have not. It came to me in the cancer center this was a way to enforce recreation for myself. Every holiday I start a jigsaw puzzle. I remain engrossed in the puzzle until it is finished, giving my mind and body a rest. I will admit puzzles are more fun with Beth or Anna, but I enjoyed my last puzzle immensely and became quite attached to this rooster with character.

I have the date of the next holiday, Easter – April 8, marked on the calendar with a puzzle at the ready!

Cracking a Writing Chestnut

One of the most prevalent writing chestnuts is “Write what you know.” I heard Jonathan Odell speak before I read his book, The Healing. In his own self-deprecating humor, he called attention throughout his talk to his own description as a middle-aged gay white man who grew up in a Southern segregated community. The protagonist in The Healing, who is telling her own story in the days before and after The Civil War, is an African American mid-wife.

Transported into the reality of her time and experience as I read, I didn’t think to wonder about the irony of the “write what you know” idea until I was finished. Instead, I became caught up in that time and place and in the wisdom of the  elders –
•    Gran Gran: Creation is filled with soul-sick folks, colored and white, never knowing where they belong. They tangle everybody else up in their grief.
•    Aunt Sylvie: Tying a scrap of red on a straw broom don’t make it no Christmas tree.
•    Aunt Sylvie, on talking when one should be listening: Flies can’t fall in a tight-closed pot.
•    Polly Shine: When God wants to punish us, he gives us just ourselves to care for.
•    Polly Shine: A flapping tongue puts out the light of wisdom. And that tongue of yours could put out a house fire.
•    Polly Shine: Can’t do it in your hand until you see it in your heart. Like going to a river to fetch water without a bucket.

So is the old chestnut wrong? Not really. While Gran Gran is almost as totally opposite to Jonathan as one could get, he did write what he knew. He knew from years of research that he said was more enjoyable than the actual writing. He knew from sitting listening to an elderly African American woman who had stories stored in her mind and heart waiting for someone to ask. He knew from choosing as his first readers those who came from that culture and paying attention when they told him he got it wrong. The result is a story that is not Jonathan Odell’s but Gran Gran’s.

A few years ago, I recommended a book by an almost unknown author to our library and to any friend who would listen. I was one of many who joined that bandwagon, proving the wisdom of another writing chestnut, “The best kind of publicity is word-of-mouth.” That book was The Help. I’m predicting a similar fate for The Healing. And if you should have a chance to hear Jonathan speak, take it.

Gang Aft Agley

These are some of the few that bloomed.Blog Plan A called for gloating over Longfellow who had to wander lonely as a cloud to find his host of golden daffodils. It included showing a picture of the mass of daffodils that I can see right outside my door arcing the southwest corner of my yard every year.

I knew my plan was in trouble when a friend who watches for them on her route each spring asked, “Where are the daffodils?” The plants sport healthy green leaves, but only one segment bloomed this spring. Those were not the ones she could see as she passed.

You see, we missed winter here. I think the daffodils are saying, “Look, without my nap, I am not blooming!”

Other strange phemonema that I’ve noticed this year include dogwood and Bradford pears that are putting out leaves before the flowers are finished instead of waiting for their turn. Right here in mid-March, my daylilies have started blooming and purple spiderwort wildflowers blossom by the road. Even the fauna are out early with yellow sulfur butterflies flitting around and yesterday’s little black snake greeting me in my flower bed. We missed winter. Now it appears we shall miss spring as well.

So what happens to Blog Plan A? I’m switching poets. Mama introduced me to Longfellow’s daffodils in her poetry read-alouds. She also introduced me to the “Immortal Robbie Burns.” In my first memory, I just loved the sound of his Scottish words without having much sense of their meaning.
    “The best-laid schemes o’ mice an’ men
        Gang aft agley,       
    An’ lea’e us naught but grief an’ pain,
        For promised joy!”

Life has given me understanding and a lot of experience in plans gone astray and in moving to Blog Plan B. So Longfellow can gloat as he wins this round. Blog Plan B is to enjoy the day lilies.

                      

Going Back to THE UNDERNEATH

In 2008, my friend on the Newbery Committee asked me to do her a big favor. She wanted me to read books and give her my opinion. Just look at the sacrifice she asked me to make: 1 – I had to read. 2 – I had to give my opinion. Out of the goodness of my heart, I agreed. I didn’t read nearly as many books as the committee members, and I didn’t have the burden of getting this right since that award makes a book an unending part of the children’s literature canon. However, I took it seriously and read about 50 books. One of those was The Underneath by Kathi Appelt.

Now, Kathi had to overcome a couple of things to get me involved in this book. First, I am not a cat person. Secondly, for pleasure I choose historical fiction – not books with shape-shifters. But she hooked me with her first line, “There is nothing lonelier than a cat who has been loved, at least for a while, and then abandoned on the side of the road.”

I followed that hook at once with my first reading. I read quickly from beginning to end, anxious for the animals in the “dark and holy” Underneath and for the shape-shifters in the Caddo woods bordering Little Sorrowful Creek. Compelled to finish in a sitting, I breathed a sigh of relief when the ends were tied together into a satisfying close.  So what did I do then?

I immediately turned the book back to the beginning and read slowly. I read the first time as a reader. This time I read as a writer, looking to see how Kathi Appelt worked her magic. I saw her move back and forth from the forest to the Underneath, from the animals to the shape-shifters. I was reminded of weavers on a loom, plying their threads over and under and around until a beautiful pattern emerges. I relished description made me settle into the darkness and safety of the Underneath, feel the warmth of the goldy sun, or shudder in the midst of the storm.

I loved her poetic rules and their refrain:
•    Do not cross his angry path. Do not.
•    Do not look into that mouth of cotton. Do not.
•    Do not get in front of the man and his rifle. Do not.
After I finished my second read, I suggested that our Oak Grove Library buy a copy and they did.

So why did I read The Underneath a third time? Missing is a theme in the book, and I felt it myself. It’s been four years, and I missed Ranger, Sabine, and Puck. I missed the Alligator King, Grandmother Moccasin, and Night Song. I even missed Gar Face a little bit. So I returned to the library this month and checked it out. I was pleased that the book was no longer in pristine condition – not from being treated roughly, just from having been read often.

Had the choice been mine, this would have been the winner of the Newbery. This is not the first time that I have preferred an honor book over the winner. Truth to tell, after the cream rises to the top in each year’s selections, good arguments can be made for any of those books. I am really glad the burden of that right choice is not on my shoulders.

Just the same, I will conclude this blog with an important admonition:

Do not miss this book. Do not.

Driving Richard Peck

As time nears for the annual Faye B. Kaigler Children’s Book Festival at the University of Southern Mississippi, I manage my wait time by reminiscing about festivals past. For several years, I’ve been a driver for one of the guests. I can’t remember exactly how this started, but I have suspicions that it may be similar to the way I handled pesky kids who hung around my desk by giving them something to do.

One of my favorite memories from this assignment comes from the year I drove Richard Peck. USM had finished making the campus pedestrian friendly by closing off several streets that used to run through the campus. On our return from supper at the Alumni House, I took a street that had become a dead end. With cars parked on both sides of a narrow street and another car behind me, I proceeded to rock my car back and forth to get turned around.

About halfway through this process, I invoked the name of what may be Richard’s most beloved character from his books. “Richard, before this is over, you may wish that Grandma Dowdel was driving.”

“Oh, no,” he said. “She can’t drive either.”

The laughter from the two back seat passengers drowned out his assurance that he was kidding.

Besides having a quick wit and being a genuinely nice person, Richard also gave good advice to attendees at the festival:
•    You have to read 1,000 books before you write one.
•    The Great American Theme is coming-of-age.
•    You always learn the most from the experience you would have avoided if you could.
•    You can only write by the light of the bridges burning behind you.

This month’s Horn Book Magazine gives another quote from him, “We write in admiration of better writers than we are.” For me, one of those is Richard Peck.

Ex-Kid? Maybe

Jacob Ezra Katz began life on March 11, 1916 as a scrawny immature baby, starting his life in an incubator. The neighbors who came to see him when he was big enough to come home immediately asked, “Do you think he will make it?” The future didn’t look promising for a child of Jewish immigrant parents struggling to eke out a living in Brooklyn. If they could only have known…

Ezra didn’t stay scrawny and immature, but he did stay sickly all his life and enhanced his real health problems with a touch of hypochondria. He didn’t even stay Jacob Ezra Katz, changing his name as an adult to Ezra Jack Keats in response to an anti-Semitic environment.

His venture into the art world began when he was a toddler scribbling on the linoleum floor and eating his crayons. This venture continued as a preschooler who decorated the kitchen table all the way around with ink drawings, an award-winning art student as he passed through school, and an adult who struggled to make a living with his art. He came into his own in midlife when he began to illustrate for children’s magazines and books. His real breakthrough came with the publication of the first book he both wrote and illustrated – The Snowy Day – now celebrating the 50th year since its publication.

The book was significant for children as the first full color picture book to feature a Black child as the protagonist in a non-stereotypical way. But he went on to write many more, including in his books the children of the many ethnicities he had grown up with in his Brooklyn neighborhood. They had fun and solved problems common to all children everywhere, confirmed by the many languages into which they were translated, but he continued to use the city tenements of his childhood for his favorite setting.

Keats enjoyed many recognitions from libraries and cities that had Ezra Jack Keats Days and named reading rooms for him. He won the Caldedott Medal for The Snowy Day and received a medallion given by the University of Southern Mississippi for his body of work. He came a long way from his fragile beginning.

For all his awards, I think Keats would be most pleased that his book The Snowy Day is still being chosen for things like my friend’s literacy project in North Carolina where the book will be featured in a reading fair for children who don’t have access to many books of their own. My friend knows my interest in all Keats things and asked me for ideas. She will read from a large copy of The Snowy Day with the children using their own smaller copies. I would like to have a periscope that sees from Mississippi to North Carolina to watch them enjoy the book – and perhaps make their own collages afterwards. Maybe she’ll send pictures.

Someone said Keats’s continuing appeal to children came because he was an ex-kid. The “ex” is debatable. I think the kid was still alive and well inside him until the day he died. My plan for his birthday on Sunday is to find the kid inside me, read the anniversary edition of The Snowy Day, and sing happy birthday to Ezra on what would be his 96th.

The Joys of Reading Aloud

I do love a good celebration, and March 7 is World Read Aloud Day. Although I loved my years as a classroom teacher, I have not once missed writing lesson plans, grading papers, or filling out report cards. Truthfully, I have only missed my relationships with my students and reading aloud. No matter what age I taught, reading aloud was part of the day.

My kindergarteners and I sat in a circle where I held the book for them to see the pictures and read upside down. They chanted with me the Gingerbread Man’s refrain, “Run, run, as fast as you can…”, empathized with the friendship of Frog and Toad, and giggled over Petunia’s belief that merely owning a book made her wise. Reading aloud was the central part of the day.

I read to my second graders at the end of the day. No matter what the day had held – hard math problems, turnip greens for cafeteria lunch, or skinned knees on the playground – the read aloud assured a happy ending. They loved Tikki Tikki Tembo and worked hard to say his whole name (Tikki Tikki Tembo No Sa Rembo Chari Bari Ruchi Pip Peri Pembo) correctly to earn the reward of borrowing my book. And how they loved the story in each chapter of All-of-a- Kind Family, especially the surprise when their friends Charlie and the Library Lady find their lost loves – each other – at the family Succoth celebration! One parent helper even changed her volunteering time to be there for the read-aloud. Her favorite was Stuart Little.

I started my junior high classes daily with the read aloud. It gave us connections. They enjoyed the chapter in Cheaper by the Dozen when Mr. Gilbreth, the autocrat of dinner table conversation, declares that the cute new boy at school is “not of general interest” for discussion whereas any topic of world affairs is acceptable. Afterwards, when these junior high jewels began to chase rabbits to get me off language arts topics, all I had to say was “not of general interest.” They laughed and returned to the subject – no doubt classifying me as the autocrat of the classroom.     
    Perhaps my favorite was the character tracking we did on the overhead as we kept up with the multitude of characters in Tale of Two Cities. The day came when Jerry discovers the man who had been missing from the grave he robbed, alive and well in Paris – and up to no good. What fun I had watching as the light came on in the students’ faces one by one as they joined the important discovery by the almost forgotten minor character with the rusty nails.
    One Monday, a student came in to bemoan one of her friend’s bad decisions over the weekend. She laughed at herself. “I said to myself that she was thinking just like Jeff until I remembered Jeff wasn’t real.” He was the naive protagonist in A Solitary Blue by Cynthia Voight, a favorite read aloud for this teacher as well as her students.
    Then there was the day the assistant principal came in to do his unannounced observation of my teaching during the read aloud. He forgot that his status as a fly-on-the-wall and jumped right into the middle of the ensuing discussion. (I wound up with an extra unexpected older student that day!)

There are solid educational reasons for reading aloud, but for me, the most important reason is the sheer pleasure for the reader and listeners. After all, in the end, isn’t the purpose of teaching reading to turn students into lifelong book lovers?

Thank you, Dr. Seuss

My first kiddie lit course came secondhand the year I was thirteen. In those days because she had two years of college, Mama taught first grade on a “temporary certificate” and took six semester hours of college credit every summer at Ole Miss to renew her teaching certificate for the following fall. The summer she took the children’s literature course, she shared her enthusiasm for writers like Roger Duvoisin, Wanda Gag, Robert McCloskey, and Eleanor Estes. Her textbook, bought “used” to save money, became a family treasure of stories from great literature. My youngest sister, who had used its stories with her son, generously returned the battered book to me a couple of years ago.  

Although he had been writing for a while, it was this during this summer class that Mama discovered Dr. Seuss. She loved And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street. It became one of the staples in her first grade classroom long before it became one of mine when I taught kindergarten and second grade. The front of my worn copy has my oldest son’s name and our address when he was in first grade. (Don’t tell him or he will want it back.) It also has a sticky note on the title page that says it got 29 rejections before a publisher bought it and that he used “Dr. Seuss” as his pseudonym for the children’s book intending to save his real name – Theodore Seuss Geisel – for serious adult stuff. Thankfully, he thought better of that idea and left a world of people with their own connections to his treasure trove of children’s books, including the people in my family.

Our first child loved The 500 Hats of Bartholemew Cubbins and soon “flupp, flupp, flupped” along as the hats flew off Bartholemew’s head while he climbed the stairs. The second two learned to read from Dr. Seuss’s ABC followed by Hop on Pop. By the time they mastered One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish, they rightfully demanded personal library cards considering themselves ready to read any book in the children’s section.

The next generation has followed suit with grandchildren loving the sounds of Seuss until almost by magic, they turned into words to read. Sam thought Green Eggs and Ham was personalized – a notion perhaps reinforced by the Sam-I-Am mug I bought for him.

Buried in Seussian fun are lessons to learn about taking care of the environment from the Lorax or being faithful to promises from Horton. The Whos remind us and the Grinch that Christmas is “a little bit more” than what can be bought in a store. And how many high school and college graduates have received Oh, the Places You’ll Go to encourage them to follow their dreams?

No doubt you have your own connections to Dr. Seuss. Many people have tried to emulate his way with words and rhymes only to come off as jingle writers in a poor imitation. Perhaps it could be said of him as he said of the episode of Bartholemew Cubbins’s 500 hats that he “just happened to happen and was not likely to happen again.”

Happy birthday Dr. Seuss – born March 2, 1904!

Laundry Lament

The trouble with working at home is that you are at home, making it hard to ignore disaster in the laundry room. Mind you, the Maytag avocado washer and dryer dated to 1978 and had been bought, after careful research, to survive until our last son finished college. Even with prices in those days, we knew we didn’t need appliance purchases added to a budget with two-at-a-time tuitions. This appliance pair has contributed to the loneliness of Maytag repairmen having had one minor repair to the washer and one new lint filter for the dryer in the ensuing years.

But the washer began galumping around several weeks ago, giving a warning that its time was near. I was only surprised that the dryer quit first. After the normal dryer time elapsed Saturday morning, I reached in to take out the laundry only to find the load as wet and cold as when I put it in. My husband, ever the conservative, wanted to call a repairman for life support. But I reasoned that the elderly appliances surely had signed a “Do not resuscitate” order. After all, the aforementioned son finished college in 1992. His oldest son is filling out college applications for this fall.

My Saturday “To Do List” included finishing a book I was reading [remember that is part of a writer’s work] and some scribbling between my loads of laundry. Appliance shopping was not on the list. It was added – at the top.

Tomorrow we will take delivery of a new white washer and dryer. The old avocado ones will not be cremated but recycled. The salesman made no promises that the new ones will last 34 years. In fact, he said he had never heard before of any that had lasted that long.

They lived a good life and fulfilled their purpose. May they rest in peace.

Teasing Increases IQ? - Who Knew?

A few days before the 101th anniversary of my father’s birth on February 23, I found an interesting bit of research while looking for a totally unrelated topic. The research justified Daddy’s penchant for teasing his four girls, although I’m pretty sure he didn’t feel the need for any validation. He was just having a good time with us. The research found that children growing up in a culture where teasing was common had higher intelligence scores.

In a way, this is ironic because the closest Daddy ever came to a term of endearment was to call me “Knothead” which Merriam-Webster defines as “a dull-witted blunderer.” In rural North Mississippi, it was generally understood that the knot in a piece of wood was the densest hardest part. I think that’s the definition Daddy had in mind.

Along with his teasing, Daddy read with care anything I wrote and discussed the fine points he found. He insisted that I could indeed stand up in front of people and talk. Perhaps it’s just as well that he never understood why that was a fear, because I backed my ears and learned to do it – pretty much to keep from disappointing him. The first time I enjoyed speaking in public came as a total surprise.

He was realistic in the areas where I lacked accomplishment and added that to his banter. If I made a drawing, he advised me to write underneath, “This is a cow,” – or whatever it was. As you can see from the picture, I still need to do that.

When I brought home a paper from school for congratulations, Daddy would look at the “97” or “98” and say, “Well, if you could do that well, you could have made 100.” If I did get the “100,” he would say, “Well, it’s no better than you ought to have done.” Mama would go into defense mode trying to keep me from being warped for life and protest his lack of appreciation for my accomplishment. Daddy and I would smile behind her back and let her continue to fix what needed no fixing. I knew he was proud of my work, and he knew I knew.

I’ll let you be the judge of whether he warped me for life or increased my intelligence. But I have noticed that he has left me with a peculiar reaction when someone says something to me that could be derogatory. I tend to laugh, assuming that, like Daddy, thespeaker is teasing.

There's a Name for That

I am elated. I have recently learned the name of a phenomena that I have experienced for many years. During my peripatetic life in many places, I’ve always attended choir practice on Wednesday nights. After I get home, one of the tunes usually inhabits my head and plays itself over and over and over, often ruining my night’s sleep. I have recently learned the very appropriate name for this. It is called an ear worm.

The ear worm is not confined to nighttime. Nor is it confined to a single day. It may last one night or one week or anything between. I usually get a new one at the next choir practice.  

The ear worm may sing itself as I take a walk or as I pull weeds in my garden. On the days when it is a pleasant tune that I like, it saves me the price of an iPod. Other days, when it is the least liked song from choir rehearsal, the more I shake my head to rid myself of it, the deeper the worm seems to crawl, looking for a permanent home. The experts say the only way to get rid of one ear worm is to replace it with another. However, so far as I can tell, there is no way to control or foretell which new song at the next rehearsal will be the replacement. You might think it would be the one we practiced the most often, the one we worked on the hardest, or maybe the last one we did. Not so. I have about the same chance of choosing my weekly ear worm as I have in deciding which day this week it’s going to rain. Sometimes I get a new one attending an event such as Saturday night’s concert sponsored by the University of Southern Mississippi School of Music where the choir sang a rousing rendition of “Down to the River to Pray.” Now the ear worm is repeating, “O, sisters, let’s go down, down to the river to pray.” I will say this is one of my better worms!

Obviously, I have not learned much about how to regulate or predict this phenomena, but I am ecstatic that I have learned its name. One of the good things about being a nerd is that it doesn’t take a whole lot to make you happy. Since I love this term, I have adopted it as my ear worm of the week – or is that redundant?

Reading on My Age Level

My comments on choosing books by looking at age level in my last blog seems to have either struck a raw nerve, especially among capable and competent librarians, or brought back wonderful library memories. To follow up, I’ve listed my last stack of books checked out from our excellent Oak Grove Library. To make my choices, the question I asked was not, “What age level is this book?” but “How much fun would this book be?”

By the calendar, I’ve been considered an adult for some time now, but one might have a hard time guessing my age from the bag I toted out of the library. On this trip, it contained books from the easy reader to adult, from fiction to non-fiction, from prose to poetry:

•    War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
•    Charles Dickens: A Life – Claire Tomalin
•    Wonderstruck – Brian Selznick
•    Never Knowing – Chevy Stevens
•    The Forest Lover – Susan Vreeland
•    Drawing from Memory – Allen Say
•    Built – David Macaulay
•    The Underneath – Kathi Appelt
•    The Battlefield Ghost – Margery Cuyler
•    Trapped: How the World Rescued 33 Miners from 2,000 Feet below the Chilean Desert – Marc Aronson
•    The Poet Slave of Cuba; a Biography of Juan Francisco Manzano – Margarita Engle

A couple of days later I added the other books they had to order from within the Lamar County system:

•    Secrets of a Civil War Submarine – Sally M. Walker
•    Tracking Trash – Loree Griffin Burns
•    Grandfather’s Journey – Allen Say

You might ask which are for business and which are for pleasure. I would answer, “All of them.” For business, because a writer must be a reader. For pleasure, because I don’t have a specific reading list and can read whatever excites my fancy. At this point, I’m sure you are wanting my job, but that’s before I get into rejection letters. I’ll save that for a different blog.

Even if you have been a grown-up for a while, I hope you ask my second question when you go to the library. I also suggest spending some serious time with Jerry Pinckney’s picture book The Lion and the Mouse, which has not a word of text or find Mo Willems’s book to learn why he doesn’t want to let the pigeon drive the bus. Moving into more text, read some books by Richard Peck, Gary Schmidt, or Kimberly Willis Holt, who know how to tell a good story. There’s no way to make a complete list of good books written by excellent authors so just troll through the children’s, middle grade, and young adult sections of your library. Your librarian can match you up with books you will enjoy. The secret that some of the best artists today are painting for picture books and some of the best writers are doing their work for children and young adults is far too well kept.

Libraries have come a long way from the days when I waited for the bookmobile that came every two weeks – except when it didn’t – and limited me to two books at a time. My library’s limit is 30 books, and they seem to have no concern for my reading level. They have never even looked at me funny for checking out picture books.

At War with Librarians

As a rule, I love librarians [including daughter Anna and sister Beth] and hang with them every chance I get. But there have been two that brought out the crusader in me. The first, who shall remain unnamed, ran a very efficient operation in the elementary school where I taught second grade. Each of the thirty-five or so second through fourth grade classes had a specified weekly time in the library. Children were allowed to check out two books. If they finished their books or were absent on the appointed library day, they had to wait for the next one.

The contrast to my previous school took me aback. My second graders in that school had haunted the library before school and at recess and my reward to them for good behavior or outstanding work was a ticket for free time in the library. The librarian knew the students and their interests and “hand-sold” them books they would enjoy. She also recommended great read-alouds to teachers.

However, my adjustment to the new librarian’s system was nothing compared to my reaction when I saw the labels confining my second graders to the right side of HER library because those books were “on their reading level.” I figuratively mounted my steed and took out my sword. With the support of a wonderful principal, I convinced her that my students knew the five-finger test and could wisely select from any shelf in the library. [Five-finger test: Open the book on a normal page in the middle and read. For every too-difficult word, put down one finger. If five fingers are down at the end, the book will be hard to read. Notice I still did not say they COULDN'T read it, just that it would be hard.] Her concession, such as it was, allowed MY students the privilege of using all the shelves in HER library. The other eleven second grade classes remained confined to the right side shelves.

I let her win a second regulation since it did have some logic and justice. My practice was to read aloud only one book per author with the idea that children who liked the book could find more by that author in the library to read independently. After the first Ramona book, the children swarmed the Beverly Cleary section on their next library visit and cleared it out. The librarian soon made a rule limiting the number of Cleary books that could be checked to my class at any one time so there would be some left for the other second graders. I left that alone, but my clever second graders figured out their own way around the regulation. The checked out the limit and exchanged among themselves until the next library day.

In the same school, I began to get reports from parents complaining about the post librarian. That one also belonged to the Reading Level Police and refused to check out big books to pint-sized readers. The insinuation of the parents who dumped the problem in my lap was, “You’ve taught them to read well and turned them onto books. Now that you’ve made this problem, you need to fix it.”

So I mounted my trusty steed, shined my sword, and headed to the post library. In her defense, the chief librarian assured me she had no idea such an atrocity was being committed by one of her workers and that it would not happen again.

My next move to junior high school brought me back to the kind of librarian I expect and love. Students freely came in and out of the library. The librarian stayed involved in helping them with research and book selections – and even checked to see what I was teaching so she could coordinate her lessons at their regular library time.

It scares me when I hear that librarians and libraries are among the first targets in budget cuts. These two with whom I waged war are an anomaly. The degree that good libraries and librarians increased my effectiveness as a teacher over many years is truly immeasurable. If you should hear of a threat to cut back on library services to schools or communities, I hope you have a reliable steed, a sturdy sword, and a willingness to do battle.

[And I do know that they are called Media Specialists these days, but that really doesn’t have the warmth and personality of “librarian.”]   

The Butterfly Cabinet

I can like a book if it has a compelling story, polished writing, or nuggets that make me think. The Butterfly Cabinet scores on all three. Told in back and forth chapters between a old woman clearing her soul of a lifelong secret and the prison diary of her mistress, one might stop to admire the writing if the story were not so compelling.

A quote about old age in my friend Martha Ginn’s blog put me onto the book to start with. “You'd think the way people go on that if they stand too close to old age and loneliness they'll catch it themselves. I suppose that's true in a way, because you do catch it, if you stay around long enough. But you don't get it from other people; you don't get it from anybody but yourself.”

But I have found more quotes of my own that have left me thinking as I read the book.

On death: “There was a wake and the neighbors came and told stories I’d never heard. Why do people wait till a person is dead to do that?”

On wages: “I was to have five shillings and two pounds of soap a month and every Sunday afternoon free.”

On bedtime stories: “That’s what we do: tell made-up stories to fend off the night, to put off telling the truth.”

On justice: “There’s much to be said for a vision of a world in black and white: it is so much safer than having to consider shades and variations of color and tone.”

On freedom: “This is not my prison. I carry it with me. We devise cages of our own choosing.”

Irish author Bernie McGill tells a fine tale with beautiful words and leaves her reader pondering some of its hidden wisdom. Perhaps there really is something special in the Blarney Stone.

Who the Dickens?

Totally unaware that it was happening, my dairy farmer grandfather introduced me to Charles Dickens as a child. An eavesdropper on adult conversations, I’d hear him say, “Well, he’s a lot like Mr. Micawber.” That usually ended a discussion drifting toward gossip. I assumed Mr. Micawber was someone they knew in Sturgis, Mississippi since the adults would murmur sympathetically and move to another topic. Imagine my surprise when I read David Copperfield as a high school senior and discovered Mr. Micawber in the book! Now I understood Papaw’s reminder that the party in question was a likeable ne’er-do-well with good intentions and a weak work ethic.

Dickens began his semi-autobiographical novel David Copperfield with the words, “I was born.” That would be 200 years ago on February 7, 1812. Mr. Micawber’s character was based on his father, a likeable man who never managed the work ethic that would keep him out of debtor’s prison. Other Dickens characters have also become iconic. We know Scrooge, Miss Havisham, Fagan, Tiny Tim, and Sydney Carton. This week’s Word-A-Day from Wordsmith.org has gone so far as to do their vocabulary from words we use that are based on Dickens characters.

The current Smithsonian Magazine [February 2012] features tributes to him in England and the new biography that I just read by Claire Tomalin – Charles Dickens: A Life. I recommend reading the biography only if you are willing to have an idealized vision of Dickens tarnished. A telling quote rests on his love of acting and the theater as well as his writing, “…being himself was more exhausting than impersonating a stage character, who would run on predictable tracks, whereas Dickens did not always know where he was going next.”

The biography pictures a man with an obsession for work and making money. Perhaps this came from his early years of embarrassment by his father's stay in debtor’s prison and the deprivations of poverty. He made a lot of money from his writing as it was serialized, again when the work was bound into books, and added large fees for his popular public readings. That money supported his father and brother, his children – only one of whom managed to support himself, a number of widows and orphans of friends, and others he felt responsible for.

The book pictures a man with a social conscience in real life as well as in this writings. Underfed and unhappy children touched him. He said, “We should be devilishly sharp in what we do to children.” He engaged in a lifelong crusade against all forms of human trafficking from deprived children to women forced into prostitution. Claire Tomalin writes a well-researched book giving a balanced picture of a workaholic philanthropist who was a poor father and a worse husband.

Dickens was compulsively working on yet another novel when he died – perhaps having worn himself out at age 58. He left more words behind than many writers who lived much longer with a legacy that continues unabated. Coincidentally as I write this blog, my local paper has an account of second grade students at Petal Primary School who used a production of A Christmas Carol to raise $770 for a local children’s home. I think this would please Dickens more than with his burial at Westminster Abbey!

I found the biography almost as entertaining as his books and came away sympathetic toward this flawed man with high ideals. His imperfection has not changed my enjoyment of his work. If you read this blog often or know me well, you already know my penchant for reading A Christmas Carol every Christmas – preferably aloud with listeners. And should I be marooned on a desert island with but one book to read for pleasure, please make it A Tale of Two Cities.

50 Years of Snowy Days

The final in my series of blogs about 50 year children’s book anniversaries prompts a disclaimer in the interest of full disclosure. I was the researcher in the de Grummond Children’s Literature Collection who sent an inventory from which the editor chose the pictures and wrote the commentary for the extra eight pages in the anniversary edition of The Snowy Day. The editor made excellent choices and the designers put together a book well worth adding to a collection.

By the late 1950s, Ezra Jack Keats* had begun to make a living wage and a name for himself with his paintings, adult book jackets, and illustrations for other authors’ children’s books. One snowy night as he walked home with friends, they began to reminisce about the things they did in the snow as children. Suddenly Ezra said, “I know what I’ll do. I’ll write a book about this and dedicate it to all of you.”

Back in his studio, he found an almost twenty-year-old Life Magazine clipping he had saved showing four frames of a little boy getting ready for a blood test for a malaria survey. This child he had loved would be Peter. He began to paint, cut paper, and play with collage. To save the publisher money, he planned to alternate colored pages with black and white, but his editor insisted the book should be in full color.

The finished book, dedicated to his friends, was significant as the first full-color picture book to feature an African American child as the protagonist in a non-stereotypical way. It brought further excitement when it won the Caldecott Award for 1962 although Ezra had never heard of this honor and didn’t know what it was. The award came with bad news. He had to make an acceptance speech in front of 1800 librarians! His many efforts to avoid this public speaking failed, but his speech did not. In fact, the official picture taken afterwards shows him looking quite proud of himself in his white dinner jacket with the taller elegant Madeleine L’Engle, winner of the Newbery Award.

By the time my children and students loved the book in the 70s and 80s, they took little notice that Peter was Black. It seemed normal for him to be there. They would have agreed with Ezra’s assessment, “He should have been there all along.” So would children around the world. The book was translated into at least ten languages.

After several more Peter books, Ezra followed with an abundance of other books. Thankfully, he also learned to enjoy public speaking as he traveled in the US and abroad sharing his stories with children, parents, and teachers.

50 years of Snowy Days! A snowy collage picture might be a good way to celebrate:
•    Construction paper – check
•    Scissors – check
•    Glue – check
•    White chalk – check

*Ezra Jack Keats was born Jacob Ezra Katz. His own experience with prejudice in the form of anti-Semitism brought on the name change. In school and as an adult, he was usually called “Jack.” His friends from childhood continued to call him “Ezra.”

And the Winner Is...

My children, grandchildren, students, friends, relatives – anyone who knows me at all will tell you that I love a good competition – and I am fond of winning. I have never “let” a child win a contest in my life, feeling that their pride will swell big time when they beat me honestly. [Just ask grandson Sam Butler who has now beat me at Scrabble or daughter Anna Lane who reminds us annually of the date she won at Trivial Pursuit.]

I don’t go quite as far as the mother who took me to look at the reading fair competition in a large cafeteria with back-to-back and side-to-side entries on every table. Her daughter won second place and her question was, “What’s wrong with my daughter’s board?” I wanted to say, “Gee, whilikers! With this many entries, why aren’t you jumping up and down for a second place win?” My father had a different attitude and was quite proud of the second place trophy in the picture. In 1981 he won it in the Choctaw County Mississippi domino tournament at an old timey county weekend festival. I, too, treasure it and keep it atop my office file.

I’m pulling for Eli Manning and the Giants to win the Super Bowl next Saturday. Quite honestly, I will be disappointed in a second place finish, but I can look at the large number of teams that didn’t get that far and know that second place isn’t a bad finish. [Feel free to remind me of this if they lose.]

This weekend I watched the US Figure Skating Finals and took pride that Army Brat Ashley Wagner took home first in the ladies’ competiton. [See my "Mardi Gras to Piper Reed" blog for the Army Brat significance.] But Alissa Czisny needn’t go home with her head down after an elegant second place program. Both advanced to the World’s Competition.

I could go on but I want to get to the competition that makes a difference for children. The American Library Association recently gave a series of awards to writers of children’s books. The most famous of these are the Newbery for outstanding contribution to children’s literature and the Caldecott for the most distinguished American picture book. I have followed a Newbery blog this year that seemed credible and did a lot of educated guessing about possible winners. Surprise! Surprise! Neither the ones they talked about, nor the one I was pulling for, was the winner. [For the complete list of winners, check the American Library Association website. You can add to your “To-Read List” as I am doing and enjoy!]

I know just a tad of how this works since one year I had a friend on the committee who asked me to read with her and pass along my opinions. [This is allowed. I just couldn’t know what the committee members were saying amongst themselves.] I read a lot of books – not nearly as many as she did – and chose my favorite. Wouldn’t you know it came in as an Honor Book? – not unlike a second place. I hold to my opinion that it was the best and will blog about it soon. It’s not the first time that I chose an Honor Book over the winner. By the time that cream gets to the top, and the committee is left with a few superb books, I would hate to be the one making that final choice. Instead, I give a big thank you to all those librarians who read carefully and discuss at length to find the very best in children’s literature. Children – and a few adults – look for those books with a gold or silver seal knowing they can trust them for a good read.

I will not mess up my blog with my other thoughts about the major networks who did not feel these book awards were worthy of mention on morning shows filled instead with celebrity marriages & divorces, recipes, weight losses or gains, the scandal of the week… You, truly, don’t want me to get started on that.

Still Wrinkling After 50 Years

Madeleine L’Engle begins A Wrinkle in Time, “It was a dark and stormy night,” and by page 6 has Meg looking at herself in the mirror to tell us what she looks like. So why do all the “experts” tell writers never to do either of these? Maybe because they’ve already been done so well and been copied so many times that they have become clichés*. And maybe it’s because we writers don’t follow those beginnings with such an intriguing tale.

A Wrinkle in Time won the Newbery Award for books published in 1962 and has won the hearts of children and many adults ever since. [Just look how worn my library copy is!] Madeleine went on to write a Time Quintet of books using these characters – A Wind in the Door, A Swiftly Tilting Planet, Many Waters, and An Acceptable Time. I just discovered Many Waters a couple of years ago and was intrigued with her way of weaving the biblical Noah story into her plot. And the quintet only begins her long list of well loved children’s books. Yet there is another dimension to her writing.

I like Madeleine’s philosophy quoted on her website, “You have to write the book that wants to be written. And if the book will be too difficult for grown-ups, then you write it for children.” She wrote a number of “simpler” books for those adults in a “sit around the teapot and talk” style. My personal favorites are Two Part Invention: The Story of a Marriage, a delightful family memoir, and Walking on Water, a must-read for those writers and other artists who want to connect their spiritual and creative sides in pursuing their art.

Wrinkle gave Madeleine a firm foothold in the writing world, and she used it to climb to the pinnacle. She lived up to her own quote from Mrs. Whatsit comparing life to a sonnet, “You’re given the form, but you have to write the sonnet yourself. What you say is completely up to you.”     

A very happy 50th anniversary to A Wrinkle in Time. May it long continue to bring its own pleasant twist to the minds of its readers.

* Speaking of clichés – Alice has already awakened to find that Wonderland is a dream so writers can skip this one, too. And if I never hear the now tired cliché that was fresh and new when Yogi Berra said it, “Déjà vu, all over again,” it will be okay with me.   

Meandering from Mardi Gras to Piper Reed

“Military Brat,” a term of endearment, is always accurate in its first word and seldom in its second. [I know this because I taught a gazillion of them.] It describes children who go wherever the Army, Navy, Air Force, or Coast Guard assign their parent(s) and is often made specific as in “Army Brat” which described our three. This enriching lifestyle allows them to pick up the culture of the local city, state, or country as they go, but leaves them with a dilemma when someone asks, “Where are you from?’ Most often, they have little memory of their place of birth and don’t consider themselves “from there.”
    My mind began to wander over this phenomenon as Mardi Gras season got into full swing, and I recalled our children picking up its customs with our move to Louisiana. Purple, green, and gold colors; dubloons; strings of cheap beads; and especially King Cake abounded between Epiphany and Mardi Gras.
    From that point, my mind meandered easily to a “Navy Brat” author who found some roots in  Louisiana because that’s where her grandparents lived. Kimberly Willis Holt used the home base of her grandparents in central Louisiana as she began her writing with Mister and Me and My Louisiana Sky and after a couple of excursions for books set in her eventual home state of Texas returned to Louisiana for my personal favorite of her books – Part of Me. She traveled back to another of her “homes” provided by the Navy in Guam for Keeper of the Night. She added a few picture books and a historical novel, The Water Seeker.
    But the books that showed up in my train of thought was her series beginning with Piper Reed, Navy Brat. True to the good, difficult, frustrating, and exciting life of a Military Brat, these five books – with another due out in late summer – give a genuine picture of that life from someone who lived it.
    I recommend Piper Reed books to:
•    Military Brats who would like to find themselves in a book,
•    people who want to know what life is really like for a “Military Brat,” and
•    anyone who likes to read a good story.

Side Effect Warning: By the time you finish the books, you may have picked up Piper’s pet phrase – “Get Off the Bus!”

Fresh Fabulous Fifty-Year-Old Peach

For the fourteen years that I taught second grade, my students and I enjoyed an end of day read-aloud book. Some books were so good that I read them every year – including James and the Giant Peach. Imagine my surprise about halfway through this venture to discover that the book regularly appeared on the “Banned Book List.”

It seems the couple of swear words brought offense. Nevermind that 99.9% of the children had heard these words on TV, the playground, or perhaps even at home. Then James was disrespectful to Aunt Sponge and Aunt Spiker. Nevermind again, that they richly deserved that disrespect. These critics also questioned the terror of James’s parents being eaten at midday by an angry rhinocerous escaped from the London zoo. [Kids, on the other hand, knew how to suspend their disbelief in this dire happening in the interest of a good story to follow.]

But the most awful thing at all to these judges was the magic that brought size, speech, and reasoning powers to a ladybug, spider, grasshopper, centipede, and earthworm and caused the peach to grow large enough to become food and transportation for an overnight from London to New York City.

Once the flaws were pointed out to me, I could find them if I looked hard enough. But I put them out of my mind when I saw the book through the children’s eyes as they responded to the reading – a rollicking, knee-slapping case of one small boy and some eccentric cohorts triumphing over their own weaknesses, the forces of nature, and evil adults. Imagination still lives in second graders, and they loved the fantasy.

Roald Dahl found a new world in this, his first children’s book, published in 1961. He would go on to give us more than a dozen more, including another of my favorites – Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. His books continued to lean toward innocent children who overcame evil adults.

Fifty years later, children and adults who still have a firm grip on their imaginations may want to join in the celebration with James and his buddies. Happy 50th anniversary to the Giant Peach which the Ladybug declared to be “even better than those tiny green flies that live in the rosebushes.”