Children's Book Week - Part I

Children’s Book Week (May 13-19, 2013) began in 1919. Since some of today’s best writers and illustrators do their work for children, I like honoring children’s books with a week of their own. Brian Selznick, this year’s artist for the promotional poster, illustrates both his own and other books - including Wonderstruck and The Invention of Hugo Cabaret.

Here are just a few children’s books that have special meaning to me:

Heidi – My tenth birthday present from Aunt Ruth, Johanna Spyri’s book is the first book I remember reading so often I knew how far away I was from the good parts at all times.

Bow-wow, Meow – This Little Golden Book, by Melanie Bellah and illustrated by Trina Schart,, was my first experience with a toddler and a book with no limit on the number of times he wanted it read at a sitting. Murray loved doing the sounds that followed the question, “What does a . . . say?” including a realistic rendition of the baby that had me checking what was wrong with him the first time he did it. When he had made the last sound, he said, “The end. Again,” and flipped it back to the beginning. The book went out of print, was brought back as a classic, and is out of print again. Too bad.

Dr. Seuss’s Sleep Book – With a pair of children who were a year and three weeks apart, bedtime stories rotated between their beds with one on each side of me. How-many-are-asleep totals made this one a favorite. What child could resist a frontispiece declaring, “This book is to be read in bed,” or salesmen trying “to sell Zizzer-Zoof seeds which nobody wants because nobody needs,” and the news that “every light between here and Far Foodle is out”? They were quite cooperative with Seuss's closing  suggestion “when you put out your light, the number will be ninety-nine zillion, nine trillion and three.”

Tikki Tikki Tembo – I’d loved this Chinese folk tale told by a Chinese missionary when I was about ten. For years, I thought it would turn up again because it was such a good story. Imagine my shock as a kindergarten teacher when I found it on my Scholastic Book order retold by Arlene Mosel! It was no surprise that it became a favorite of my kindergarteners.

All of a Kind Family – My students loved this Sydney Taylor book that I read aloud all fourteen years that I taught second grade. Each chapter, complete in itself, was also part of an on-going story leading to a wonderful surprise at the end. The little Jewish girls in the book lived at the turn of the century in the lower East side of New York, and my kids lived in Army housing in the late 70s and 80s and were primarily either Protestant or Catholic. My students loved the aspects of life different from their own even as they related to the family love that was not different at all.

A Solitary Blue – This Cynthia Voight book was my all-time favorite read-aloud for junior high. My students could see what the protagonist could not and often wanted to yell at Jeff to pay attention. They wanted him to see that his mother used him to get what she wanted while his taciturn father really loved him.

Part of Me – This is possibly my favorite children’s book just for me. When I read Kimberly  Willis Holt’s multi-generational book, I am Rose.

Continuing to honor Children’s Book Week on my Friday blog, I will name some children’s books that live up to the promise in their enticing first lines.

Mother(s) and Daughter(s)

I got Mama’s unspoken message when she gave me Ruth Bell Graham’s book of poetry, Sitting by My Laughing Fire, and alerted me to page 167. As Mother’s Day approaches, my thoughts have returned to her, and I looked up the poem. Gifts from Mama to grown daughters were both scarce and significant. The message was striking at the time, but has acquired greater meaning now that another generation has rolled around:

       “May she have daughters
       of her own
       when she is old
       and I am gone.
       I should have loved
       to care for her once more
       as I did then
       long years before.
       I was a mother young
       and she – my child.
       Caring was joy. So when
       she is old and I am There,
       may she have daughters
       of her own
       to care.”

Mama was then a good many years from needing care from her daughters and even more from being There. My daughter was still a child at home. I knew her real message didn’t have much to do with taking care of her. Her emphasis would have been on the joy of her caring for me when I was the child. Her unspoken message was, “Now that you have a daughter, you understand the joy a mother has when she does things with and for her daughter(s).” Mama had no experience with sons. I think she might have guessed that caring for them was different but equally joyful.

The time came when Mama was old and did indeed need that care from her daughters, but that special my daughter Anna, her daughter Marissa, and merelationship had preceded it by many years. As this Mother’s Day approaches and she is There, I connect back with her even as I connect forward to my daughter. I’m grateful that she, too, has a daughter and will understand the message.

This Sunday I wish mothers of daughters – and those equally important sons – a very happy Mother’s Day.

Double Graduation

When our oldest son married, we gained a daughter-in-law and two beautiful three-year-old granddaughters. Fraternal twins, they differed in looks and personality. The week of their fourth birthday, Al and I took them out to eat for the first time without benefit of their parents. The server brought the requisite coloring book and crayons and took our orders. Both girls ordered the child’s shrimp plate. That was the last thing they did alike.

Since Brittany was quieter, I had assumed she would attach herself to Al, and I would chat with Lauren while we waited for our food. They had other ideas. Lauren took a couple of swipes at the coloring book before she abandoned it to barrage Al with questions about where people were going, what they were doing, and how each piece of equipment was used. Assuming Brittany needed company, I chatted with her while she meticulously colored every blank space in her book. I thought we were getting along famously until she sighed, looked up at me, and said, “If you don’t quit talking to me, I’m never going to finish my work.”

On Friday, they graduate from Northern Arizona University. Nothing has changed, and everything has changed. They are beautiful young women. What they have done alike is apply themselves academically and work hard schedules to help support themselves. Once again, that kind of finishes what they have done alike. Lauren has adventurous plans for seeing the world, camera in hand, with her photojournalism degree. Brittany will graduate with a degree in hotel management – and without doubt will get all her work done if she doesn’t have someone interrupting her.  

You can see from the photograph that our son knows he got a bonus when he married their mother. She is not in the picture, as usual, because she is taking it. We celebrate their likenesses and their differences and are very proud of both.

Just One Book

Everything, well almost everything, I know about the French Revolution I learned from A Tale of Two Cities, our most recent selection for our library’s Classics Book Club. Should I ever be marooned on a desert island with only one book to read for pleasure, this is the one I want.

I credit youngest son Mark with a technique that helped my junior high students enjoy the challenge of Dickens’s characters who wander in and out of his books and who may or may not be vital to his plot. In what would be our last read-aloud together in the summer between his seventh and eighth grade years, I read and he kept a character chart in a notebook.

Adapting his idea only slightly for my students, we kept a chart on the overhead with a short description of new characters and brief updates on old ones added at the end of each day’s readings. That brings me to one of my favorite experiences, repeated every year with my eighth graders. Just follow along.

In Part I, Chapter 2, we put Jerry Cruncher on the overhead sheet as the odd-job-man who sat outside Tellson’s bank and carried messages. He appears in Part II, Chapter 1 as comic relief – cleaning his rusty fingernails and berating his wife for flopping (praying) against him in his nightly endeavors. He blames her flopping in Chapter 14 when the grave he tries to rob turns up empty. He hardly seems significant when he accompanies Mr. Lorry of Tellson’s Bank to Paris as Part II closes.

The fun I have been anticipating with my reading comes in Part III, Chapter 8 when Jerry Cruncher recognizes the spy who was missing from the grave he tried to rob. I watch the kids as I read until one makes the connection and slaps her hand over her mouth. The others look a “What?” in her direction. Then one by one, like popcorn, they make the connection until I have a roomful of hands over mouths. How surprising that the odd-job-man with rusty fingernails would provide the means for Sydney Carton to rescue Charles Darnay!

I must say we all enjoyed Jerry’s repentance statement that follows in the last pages as they make preparations to escape from Paris. “Wot my opinions respectin’ flopping has undergone a change, and that wot I hope with all my heart as Mrs. Cruncher may be a flopping at the present time.”

So, if you were on a desert island with only one book to read for pleasure, what would you choose?

Driving Amoun Crazy

And it came to pass (to cover a lot of territory quickly) that I helped Amoun Sleem with her autobiography this past week. She has a powerfully fascinating story beginning as a Gypsy girl selling post cards at the Lions’ Gate in Jerusalem and ending with a business management degree directing the Domari Center there.

Wednesday after our first day of working together, she shared her story with our church after our weekly potluck. She began, “Virginia has been driving me crazy all day.” The laughter that followed made me think I might have driven some of them crazy, too.

Amoun could have been forewarned if she had talked ahead of time to some of my former junior high students. They would have told her that I also drove them crazy because I always wanted more. She sat for long periods of time at my dining room table while I prodded for more stories and more details.

Along the way, I discovered that Amoun who started life in a home overlooking the Mount of Olives and the Garden of Gethsemane in Jerusalem and Virginia who looked out over cotton fields and dairy farms in North Mississippi had quite a bit in common.
     1. We both miss our fathers for celebrating successes or counseling with problems.
     2. Our favorite writing instrument is a finely sharpened wooden pencil.
     3. Our fishing careers were both short-lived.
         Mine lasted just one afternoon when a farmer took the McGee girls to fish in his pond with cane poles. He even put the worms on the hooks for us. After an interminable time, I caught one – count ‘em – one fish about the length of my index finger. I vowed never to waste my time like this again.
         Amoun’s fishing did not last that long. She chose to catch the ornamental fish in the small pond in front of St. Anne’s church in Jerusalem. Her fun was cut short when the Father gave chase, his white robe and brown belt flying and his eight-inch cross doing a windshield wiping motion across his chest.

After two days of my “driving her crazy,” I lost track of how many times we had “one last hug” before she left. Now for the fun of getting her wonderful story into a manuscript.

It Jes' Happened

My two major requirements for a book of any length are [1] a good story in [2] a true setting. Lacking either leaves me dissatisfied and empty. It Jes’ Happened, a nonfiction picture book by Don Tate, meets both requirements – and won both the Lee and Low New Voices Award and the Ezra Jack Keats New Writer Honor Award. It traces the story of Bill Traylor from his days as the son of slaves working in the cotton fields to the end of his life when he received acclaim and a showing in the New South Art Gallery as a folk artist. [And yes, I did meet the author at the recent book festival. Don is a fine young man.]

Having grown up among people in cotton-growing communities, my ear is tuned to their language and reacts when it’s right like a musician who hears a fine piece of music done well. Don Tate uses the words of the South, with sparse use of dialect, to bring Bill Traylor and his world to life. A few examples:
•    When painting, he favored a rich spare palette of colors.
•    The women sang up a storm.
•    “Bird on top of the basket and he don’t know it,” Bill joked.

Don’s telling makes me think of a song with a refrain. For the first half of the book, each short segment of Bill’s life is followed by some form of “Bill saved up memories of these times deep inside.” In the second half, Bill paints these memories into pictures on scrap cardboard and old paper cartons.

Like many artists, Bill Traylor receives more honor for his work today than when he was producing it. Currently, a tour of his work is in progress to several cities.

It Jes’ Happened honors Bill Traylor as a person first and then as an artist. This nonfiction book reads like a story, and I predict a child will request it for repeated bedtime readings. I also predict that this “New Writer” will have other books to follow.

The Stamp Collector

A small group discussion arose at the recent book festival about the appropriateness for young children of the darkness in the Ezra Jack Keats Honor Book winner, The Stamp Collector. The next week followed with the Boston bombings. Many of us would like for children to live carefree lives that end in “happily ever after.” In this world, that is not a possibility. So what are we to do?

Allan Stratton suggests in the forward to The Stamp Collector that stories light up our hearts and imaginations and show the light that continues to shine in the darkness. Jennifer Lanthier with her beautiful words and Francois Thisdale with his illustrations that interpret those words shine that light in a book that ends in a courageous hope more realistic than “happily ever after.”

In her acceptance speech, delivered before and after a trip by the 400 + attendees to the stairwell during a tornado warning, Jennifer said her goal in writing the book was to show the hope and power ofJennifer and me with Don Tate kindly holding her book promotion words. The relationship between the boy who loved the words and became imprisoned as a man for his writing and the boy who loved the stamps and turned out to be his prison guard shines a light in that dark world.

To return to the original question of appropriateness for young children, you will probably not be surprised that I have an opinion. Knowing that we cannot shield our children from all the darkness in this world, I see this as a perfect book to be read together – adult [teacher, parent, grandparent, favorite aunt or uncle, etc.] and child or children interwoven or followed by a discussion of how to find light in darkness. It will be particularly appropriate on a week such as this one when the heroism stories followed horror so quickly

The Stamp Collector will find a place with my favorites – those books that draw me back for repeated readings to savor the beauty of the language and illustrations – especially when I need to find the hope and power in words.

Talking Plants

Some of you skeptics will not believe this, but the plants in my yard start a conversation when they see my car pull out. The evil ones [weeds] say, “She’s gone. Grow! Grow! Grow!”

The good-but-lazy ones [flowers and vegetables] say, “She’s gone. Just take a rest until she comes back. What’s she going to do about it? If she gets too rough on us, we can just die for revenge.”

Fortunately, I am onto both sets. With the car parked back in the carport on Saturday morning after two weeks of great fun with my tribes mentioned in the last three blogs, I took them on. I followed massive weed-pulling with cutting last fall’s dead goldenrod to stake my green beans.

I talked, too.

To the evil ones, I said, “Be gone! Be gone! Be gone!” yanking them rudely from the ground. I’m thinking they are not used to being addressed by Shakespeare-loving English majors. [Paraphrasing Lady MacBeth’s “out, damned spot” might have been more effective, but I feared Mama might be watching from heaven. Hearing the language, she might take back the small portion of her green thumb that I inherited.]

To the good-but-lazy ones, I followed my best parenting/teaching practices. “I’m very disappointed in you. I had expected you to do your very best even when I was not looking. My car will pull out when I will leave again this summer. I have other tribes, and I will spend time with them. I’m hoping you will do better next time.” Like my children and my students, they nodded their heads with good intentions – at least for the moment.

Book Festival Tribe

I’m completing my trilogy on favorite tribes with the Children’s Book Festival Tribe. As usual, it held both the expected and the surprising. Expected were nuggets of information from the speakers:
•    Jon Sciezka – “I was inspired by my students.” (Then he kept us in stitches telling us why he deserved this award, referring frequently to the antics of his five brothers. He is maybe even funnier in person than in my favorite of his books, The Math Curse.)
•    Candice Fleming emphasized the importance of accuracy in nonfiction including throwing out good stuff because it was wrong – like Amelia Earhart’s myths about her “naturally curly” hair and an airplane she claimed to have seen that wasn’t there.
•    Betsy and Ted Lewin chuckled at a rather dangerous photograph saying it looked like the caption should have read, “last picture taken before the death of the photographer.” What fun as they passed the microphone back and forth finishing each other’s sentences and paragraphs!
•    Grace Lin affirmed that it didn’t matter whether it was a boy book or a girl book, whether or not it was multicultural. It only mattered that a child read a good book.

As expected, a librarian won the Kaigler Lamont Award, but Liz Turner of Madison Public Library won with an unexpected feature – her program of 1,000 books before kindergarten, which might make more educational difference than a roomful of standardized tests. Just saying.  

The Magnolia Children’s Choice Awards were expected. The exponential growth in just a few years was a surprise as was the addition of a new age category.

Unexpected happenings included:
•    A tornado warning interrupting Jennifer Lanthier, Keats Honor Book winner, that sent all 300 + attendees down into a stairwell for safety. During the time in the stairwell, I found a new BFF. I think I was not alone judging by the chatter I heard all around me. Jennifer asked when we returned, “Now where was I?” and picked up right where she left off. I’ll blog soon about her book The Stamp Collector.
•    Grace Lin gave a wonderful presentation on her own journey to both honor her Chinese culture and appeal to all children in her writing only to be upstaged by her daughter Hazel who took her first steps at the festival luncheon.
•    A dinner conversation before Thursday night’s reception revealed that a pair of librarians had their first date at that very event the year Ezra Jack Keats won the medallion – thirty-three years ago. Sherry Laughlin knew immediately marriage was ahead. It took Paul a little longer.
•    Weirdest of all happenings may have been the spontaneous quartet at the end of an exhausting day when four Southern members of this tribe sang “I’ll Fly Away” for the New York contingent from the Ezra Jack Keats Foundation.

I’ll end this tribal visit with my favorite nugget of the festival from K. T. Horning who gave the Ezra Jack Keats lecture highlighting some of the Caldecott winners in celebration of the medal’s 75th anniversary. After choosing a sample from several decades for her lecture, as she does in her Horn Book Magazine series, she closed with a picture reference to my favorite, The Snowy Day, showing “Peter leaving tracks to take us into the future.”

Learner Tribe

Continuing with my theme from the “Teacher Tribe” post as promised, I’ll introduce you to another favorite “tribe.” Since I highlighted teachers, it only seems fair to follow with learners. I like this tribe from fairly short sizes through senior citizens.

My friend and first grade teacher, Ann Nelson, and her class had been reading Keats books and had become very interested in the author. She emailed me a week or so ago to  see if the Keats exhibit she had read about in Akron, OH was the same one that had been appeared in the New York Jewish Museum on loan from the University of Southern Mississippi’s de Grummond Children’s Literature Collection. I assured her it was and offered to come talk to her class about Keats. Tuesday of this week, twenty-four first graders sat criss-cross applesauce in a circle on the floor awaiting my arrival to share “Katz to Keats: A Winding Pathway.”

My tribe! They continued their in-progress discussion with their teacher while I set up, and then gave me their full attention. I had expected thirty minutes max of listening followed by a few questions at the end, but their teacher had them ready for more.

Should you want to know how to prepare students for school visits, you might want to check with Teacher Extraordinaire Ann Nelson. They’d read Keats books in class, found more in the library, and brought some from home. The information Mrs. Nelson had found about the author only left them eager to know more. She had set high expectations for good behavior with no more than a hand signal needed to make slight adjustments. Then she and her assistant sat with the children modeling interested behavior.

The children listened attentively, asking a few questions as we went along, and then a barrage after I had finished my presentation. Their questions related to what I had told them and other things they had wondered about from their reading. When they began to wind down, I looked at my watch. With hardly a wiggle, they had been sitting there for almost an hour!

They asked one question I couldn’t answer: How do they make the book and put all the words and pictures in there? I did know enough to tell them it is easier these days with digital images than when they had to do one color at a time.

My favorite question – after the teacher had passed around my USM medallion with Ezra Jack Keats on one side and Peter from The Snowy Day on the other: Is that fake or real? [Correct answer: It is real, passed along to me by my friend who was the book festival director when Keats won it.]

They proudly claimed their class title of the Nelson Navigators and seemed to think it was appropriate that my second grade classes had been called The Beautiful Butler Bunch. I did enjoy this tribe, especially since there were no papers to grade and no lesson plans to write documenting coverage of things that would be on the test.  

Teacher Tribe

I embrace some health hints with great joy. Finding out that coffee was rich in antioxidants and discouraged the onset of several dire diseases gave me an excuse for one of life’s great pleasures. Another recent health hint stressed the importance of building social capital and recommended finding what it called your “tribe.”

Tribe? I’ve got Tribes! Who knew good health could be so much fun?

I spent last Friday and Saturday with one of my favorite tribes – Zeta State [Mississippi] Delta Kappa Gamma. Officially, the Delta Kappa Gamma Society International is “a professional honorary society of women educators established in 1929 that promotes professional and personal growth of its members and excellence in education.” My unofficial definition is “a group of women who see teaching as a calling rather than just a job.”  Our group ranges from those early in their careers to those who have to look hard in the rear view mirror to find their retirement.

Even for the latter, one could paraphrase the old saying with, “You can take a teacher out of the classroom, but you can never take the classroom out of the teacher.” When I asked Earline Hart, my ninety-year-old roommate, if she wanted to go with me to a workshop I had chosen, she declined. She had selected a different workshop, which would give her some new ideas for the tutoring she was doing at a local school.

This weekend our Mississippi section of the international tribe experienced fellowship, workshops, inspiration, and traditional ceremonies. One of the speakers took me back to my health hint as she told our tribe members that Delta Kappa Gamma’s insurance providers told her the society members lived longer than any of their other beneficiaries. If you are a female teacher [sorry, guys] with a sense of calling, I recommend finding a Delta Kappa Gamma member in your area and wangling an invitation to join the tribe. You’ll gain a lot more than health benefits.

That experience finished just in time for me to head to a couple of other favorite tribes – but more about that later.

Keeping Grouchies Away

Puzzling things can be riddled out during hour-long commutes to classes. We had been discussing the importance of poetry in my children’s lit class at Northwestern State University in Natchitoches, LA. I mulled over why I really loved poetry as I drove. [Mulling is not as dangerous as texting.] I’d had good teachers who read poetry beautifully and those who helped find the intricacies of author’s meanings. Somehow, I knew that while these were useful, the love came before any of this. Then it dawned on me that my enjoyment came from hearing Mama read poems just for pleasure. She seldom commented on them, often read poems far beyond our understanding, and took requests for our favorites to be read again and again. Some of our favorites included those we understood not one whit.

A comic book light bulb came on in my head in the form of a resolution for my new school year. I would not stop the learning surrounding the poems we used in my second grade classroom, but I would start each day with a poem just for pleasure. Any comments or discussion would only come as children showed interest in the poem.

Of course, we read from Shel Silversteins Where the Sidewalk Ends and A Light in the Attic. We started each month with Maurice Sendak’s Chicken Soup with Rice poem. They loved the family poems in Mary Ann Hoberman’s Fathers, Mothers, Sisters, Brothers, and giggled over Jack Prelutsky’s The New Kid on the Block and Something Big Has Been Here. They enjoyed the assortment of authors in the wonderful collection Sing a Song of Popcorn, and in the other worn volume I had brought from home that I used with my own children Favorite Poems Old and New: Selected for Boys and Girls by Helen Ferris.

My students responded much as I had responded to Mama. They had their requested favorites for repeats.  Some they enjoyed for the sounds, some for their humor, and some for the empathy they inspired. By Christmas, I had a thrilled parent, who had believed she was raising a non-reader, She made a special trip in to school to tell me that the first two items on her son’s Christmas list were the Shel Silverstein books. In an earlier blog, I mentioned Jennifer Fuller, an astute second-grader who made up a new motto which I used that year and in years to come on my poetry bulletin board, “A poem a day keeps the grouchies away.”

April is Poetry Month. I think it may be time to get back to my poem-a-day remedy for the grouchies. I recommend it, and if you have a child in your life, I recommend any of the books I have listed for theirs.

April Fool!

My favorite April Fools’ Day joke came not as a child or teenager but when I was full grown and teaching school. The previous year the Army had sent us to Kaiserslautern, West Germany too late for me to be hired by the school system so I spent the year serving as a substitute teacher. Fifth grade teacher Mr. Jackson was not out often but I loved being called to sub for him. He was a young African American teacher who knew how to manage a classroom and teach creatively all at the same time. I knew I would have a good day when I had his classes. Evidently, the admiration was mutual since he requested me when he knew he would be out.

Since I was hired full time the next year, those days of substitution were over, but Mr. Jackson and I remained friends and exchanged good ideas in the teacher’s lounge. As April Fools’ Day approached, we cooked up a plot. He would take my second grade class for the morning and insist that he was Mrs. Butler, and I would take his fifth grade class claiming to be Mr. Jackson. The contrast could hardly have been greater between a dark-skinned male and a female who had inherited her auburn-haired grandmother’s fair complexion without her beautiful hair.  

Students filing in to fifth grade that morning either remembered that I had subbed the year before and assumed Mr. Jackson was out, or they had seen me with second graders and wondered what was going on. They began to catch on to the April Fools’ joke when I insisted on being called “Mr. Jackson.”

Mr. Jackson reported second graders with the giggles when he had them call him “Mrs. Butler.” That year I had a behaviorally challenged student we’ll call Henry who had gained a reputation known throughout the school when he was a first grader. Henry and I had been working together on changes to that behavior since school began.

I didn't alert Mr. Jackson to problem students, knowing he was quite capable of handling whatever happened. I’d just given him my routines and lesson plans. He planned to pick out Henry on his own and made sure he did not look up to find him as he called the roll.

Once they got the joke, students in both classes expected us to go back to our own classrooms after roll call. The fifth graders adapted with a bit of wonder as their lessons went on as usual and smirked as they said to me, “Mr. Jackson, I don’t understand this problem.” Mr. Jackson and I returned to our own classes after lunch. Our students seemed to enjoy the prank as much as we did. My favorite part came when Mr. Jackson told me that Henry was so well behaved that he could not pick him out!

Here’s hoping you have a happy April Fool’s Day – maybe with a fun prank or two!

From Mundane to Magnificent

A wash of swamp grass started my mind down a trail of thinking about how often the magnificent is preceded by the mundane or difficult. We were in a group visiting Bellingrath Gardens with all its spring splendor – the anticipated azaleas and bulb flowers, groupings of common and unusual plants, and unexpected vistas as we turned a corner.

Al was disappointed that the roses were not blooming yet, their bare stems pruned back awaiting warmer weather. Expert that I am, I explained to him that a good garden whether of Bellingrath’s stature or the one we have at home always has the promise of more to come along with the beauty of the present season. Then we took the boat tour and came upon the swamp grass.

Our guide explained that the long strips of mundane swamp grass filtered the salt water that came in from the ocean so that it did not mingle with the fresh water on the other side. Without it the plants on the other side would be killed by the salt. That’s when I began to consider how often magnificence happens because of hard or boring work that may only seem tolerable because its ultimate promise.

That layout of Thanksgiving dinner involves chopping a quantity of celery, peppers, and onions; hours baking cakes and pies; and thoughtful remembrance of individuals’ perceived or real dietary requirements.  

I thought of the upcoming Faye B. Kaigler Book Festival, which I’m doing frequently these days like a child anticipating Christmas (12 days away). Always magnificent, one would be hard put to count the hours of scheduling participants, making travel and hotel arrangements, producing brochures, lining up volunteers, and putting out fires as plans go astray – like a tornado’s destruction of the Ogletree House where dinners for the guests have been held.  

Piano or voice recitals that move listeners to joy and tears seem to flow effortlessly, but they could not happen without hours of practice and mundane exercises that include boring repetitions going up and down the scales.

What glory there is for the athlete who scores a 3-pointer at the last buzzer that breaks a tie and keeps his team in the tournament! You know the truth. That 3-pointer represented hours and hours of practice with no spectators cheering him on.

Then there’s that book that you can’t put down. The more it seems that the words must have flowed straight from the writer’s pen – or computer, the more likely it is that it represented rewrite after rewrite with the author sweating out the exact right word over and over again.

I thought I had finished this piece until I sat last night during the last moments of quiet darkness at our church’s Tenebrae service and realized I had neglected a more important model. How had I missed it? Was not the abandonment by friends, death on a cross, and burial in a borrowed tomb the precursor to the magnificence of Easter’s resurrection?

Twice Sorry, Once Pleased

I’m sorry that a book like Yaqui Delgado Wants to Kick Your Ass needs to be written, and even more sorry that it needs to be read. I’m pleased that Meg Medina has written it so well.

Bullying is not new, but methods have become more sophisticated. Junior high boys threw rocks at me as I walked home on a Mississippi gravel road. My crime was being a nerd.

Piddy, short for Piedad, isn’t quite sure what her crime is with Yaqui, nor does it ever become completely clear – could be that Yaqui’s boy friend has given her the eye or could be her nerdiness. Typically for bullies, the explanation may have little to do with the actual victim, if a reason exists. The victim may just be available. Piddy is torn, as the victim often is, between the two evils of living with the harassment or becoming a “narc” or tattletale. As the adult reader, I kept wanting to insist that she report Yaqui and her gang, only to remember that I never told on the rock-throwers.

There were times when the story became so edgy and raw that I wanted to leave it and go away, but concern for Piddy drew me back to the next page and the next. Secondary character Lila, her mother’s best friend, is well drawn and reminded me of a favorite quote from a teacher’s conference years ago. “Every young person needs somebody who believes in them, and it doesn’t have to be a parent.” Ultimately, Lila’s words help Piddy understand her mother’s conflicted sacrifices for her and see herself as someone of value.

My favorite quote from the book leads to the ultimately satisfying ending as Piddy says, “Now it’s time to confront her – not in a school yard but in a way that makes sense to me. No matter how she fights, I’ll make sure I win in the way that matters most.”

This review is of an advance reading copy. The official release date is tomorrow, March 26. Even though my score reads twice sorry to once pleased, pleased wins out. In a book that needed to be written and needs to be read, Meg creates Piddy, a girl that the reader alternately wants to protect or to shake some sense into, and moves from the issue of bullying to making the matter personal.

*For fun and lighter fare, you might also read Meg’s picture book that won the Ezra Jack Keats Award, Tia Isa Wants a Car.

Utopia

When I was a student, I knew what Utopia would be – no tests, no papers (except those I wanted to write), no grades. Just think about it - going to school just because there were things you wanted to learn!
•    See a class discussion of Robert Frost’s definition of home in “The Death of the Hired Man” as “the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in” with no anxiety whether your analysis will match the teacher’s on an exam.
•    Picture the puzzle of figuring out when the two trains heading toward each other at 60 and 80 miles an hour will meet without worrying about whether two different trains traveling at two different speeds will show up on an upcoming test.
•    Think of listening to intriguing history of the French Revolution, but only taking notes on the parts that interest you because there will not be a essay exam or dates to remember.
It could have been Utopia.

When I was a teacher, I knew what Utopia would be – no tests, no papers, no grades. Just think about it - students who came to school because there was so much to learn.
•    See students giving creative book talks because they loved the book they had read and wanted to share.
•    Picture a class reading Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” followed by a lively discussion of the power of group dynamics that override personal judgment and morals.
•    Think of the freedom to chase a rabbit not in the lesson plan because the students are interested.
It could have been Utopia. (To be truthful, it sometimes was, especially when I liked the rabbit my students introduced.)

When I retired, I discovered Utopia exists. Scattered across the United States and affiliated with several universities are the Osher Lifelong Learning Institutes with a motto of “no tests, no papers, no grades.” Classes cover the arts, history, health and fitness, photography, and many other topics. To qualify to attend, one must be a “seasoned adult” – 50 years old or retired. I’ve participated at ours at the University of Southern Mississippi as both a student and a teacher. I pick out my classes based on what I want to learn, take notes or not, do outside reading or not.
    
I’ve taught a class called “Writing Your Life Story for Your Grandchildren” several times. Some followed writing techniques I suggested; some did not. Some started at the beginning like my example; some did not. Some wrote only in class; some wrote extra between sessions.
    Recently, I taught a seminar “From Katz to Keats” for people interested in learning the story  of children’s author Ezra Jack Keats. Some took notes; some did not. There was no test, but there will be a number of grandchildren who’ll know the story of The Snowy Day. Utopia!

You may find this kind of Utopia near you. The Bernard Osher Foundation supports a number of lifelong learning institutes for “seasoned adults” located at colleges and universities from Maine to Hawaii and Alaska. Check their website at http://usm.maine.edu/olli/national.

Where the Flowers Is

At this time of year when the first day of spring looms, I hear Daddy’s voice in my head saying, “Spring has sprung. The grass is riz. I wonder where the flowers is?”

As we four girls grew up, Daddy’s love for jingles and poem fragments pervaded our lives. An early riser, he served as our alarm clock. He’d poke his head in the door every morning and say, “Here hath been dawning another new day. Think wilt thou let it slip useless away.” Like yin and yang, his daughters’ irritation matched his cheerfulness.

Another favorite included his dinner table observation, “I eat my peas with honey. I’ve done it all my life. It makes the peas taste funny, but it keeps them on my knife.”

If family conversation deteriorated into too much seriousness, he’d lighten the mood with “I never saw a purple cow. I never hope to see one. But I can tell you anyhow, I’d rather see than be one.”

He sometimes declared a person had to be a poet, but just didn’t know it. “Look at the feet,” he would say, “They’re long fellows.”

Besides the jingles and terrible puns, Daddy had a love for great poetry. At the end of World War II, he based his college senior speech competition on a line from Milton, “War wearied hath performed what war can do,” and won the medal. Frequently, he used quotes in his sermons from Shakespeare, the Brownings, Tennyson, Frost, or other poets.

It’s peculiar which of Daddy’s gems are most likely to come to mind. I love early mornings as he did, but when I get up at five o’clock, I seldom think whether I’m letting the day slip useless away. Only rarely do I think of eating peas with honey or purple cows. From time to time, one of the great quotes comes to mind and serves a purpose as it fits something happening in my life. However, let me see the bluets, redbud, and johnny jump-ups of spring, and I automatically begin to “wonder where the flowers is.”

500 Hats for 75 Years

In the beginning, Bartholomew Cubbins didn’t have 500 hats. And in the beginning, Dr. Seuss didn’t write in the rhymes children of all ages have come to expect. Occasionally, magician chants in his books presaged the rhymes to come. Seventy-five years ago, Dr. Seuss wrote The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins as his second book. Of course, this calls for a celebration and an anniversary edition. For more information about all of the “Hats Off to Dr. Seuss!” activities in 2013 and a full tour schedule, visit http://www.seussville.com/hats-off. There may be something coming near you.

In the spring children’s announcements issue of Publisher’s Weekly, Diane Stevenson of Clarion Books reminisces about the days before the 1970s when full color picture books were prohibitively expensive. They used a process called color separation. Though I have seen examples of this process in the de Grummond Children’s Literature Collection, it is beyond my ability to completely understand or explain it. The simplified version is that an artist made four overlays for a four color book and hoped the lineup and coloration would come out right in the printing. Color, even in picture books, was used sparingly in those days.  

The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins, first published in 1938, exemplifies how illustrators adapted to those restrictions. Today’s anniversary edition uses modern technology and is in full color, but the version my oldest son regularly requested as a read aloud was the old one in black, white, and shades of gray with red used only for the hats. In my opinion, it’s one of those “less is more” cases. The red hats coming off are striking against the black, white and gray.  

Rereading the book as I prepared to write this blog took me back to a two-year-old sitting on my lap echoing the “Flupp . . . Flupp . . . Flupp” as the hats came off. I loved the last line and have sometimes repeated it when it fit the conversation, “They could only say it just ‘happened to happen’ and was not very likely to happen again.”

Before that last “again” finished reverberating, Murray would say, “The end. Again,” and flip the book back to the first page, which leads me to my helpful hint for the day. If you’re buying a book for a child, get one the parent will still enjoy at Read Aloud #287. The 500 Hats qualifies.

Double or Triple Your Pleasure

Readers, who are writers, can double their pleasure. Whoops! Make that triple if they are also photographers. This year marks the 25th anniversary of Thema, a literary magazine published in Metairie, Louisiana. The photograph shows editor Virginia Howard with the first year’s issues. I’ve been thinking about adjectives to describe this quarterly magazine. I’ve tried out funny, touching, sad, nostalgic, empathetic – and found them all correct, depending on which selection you choose to read. If you’re a reader you can find fiction of different lengths; poetry rhymed and unrhymed, in traditional or new forms; nonfiction and memoirs. Opening the magazine reminds me of taking the lid off a candy sampler, and I find the same difficulty in observing my resolution to savor just one a day.

Thema’s title comes from the premise for each issue. All the writings and photography must relate to the chosen theme. Examples are: “A week and a day,” “Who keeps it tidy?” and “Put it in your pocket, Lillian.” This leads to yet another challenging pleasure if you’re a writer or photographer. You may be a newbie with a spring in your step or a veteran with snow on the mountain. The only requirement is to write or photograph something that fits the theme. Unlike many literary magazines, there is even a small payment. A short piece might take you to dinner and a longer piece might take you and a friend, that is if you like fast food. Better than the payment may be the addition to your reputation. Writers for Thema’s pages sometimes get their names mentioned by New Pages in their literary magazine reviews.

A helpful hint is to look at the themes and see if there is something that you’ve already written that fits as I did with my “A Change in Plans” memoir for the About Two Miles Down the Road issue or my “Katrina’s Aftermath” poem for the When Things Get Back to Normal issue. Or you might use the theme as a writing prompt for something brand new. The website is http://themaliterarysociety.com or just type Thema into your search engine to order a subscription or find the list of upcoming themes. [The subscription will get you a copy of the Eyeglasses Needed issue which includes another memoir piece I wrote. Sorry about the blatant self-publicity!] Back issues are available as well if you see a topic that intrigues you.

Whether you want your pleasure as a single, double, or triple, I did finally figure out the best adjective for the magazine as a whole. Thema is quirky. There is only one like it.

The Orchardist

You’ve heard it before, but one really should not judge a book by its cover. I would add – nor by its title. Both cover and title of The Orchardist by Amanda Coplin are rather bucolic. Think about it, how exciting are your expectations for a book set in an orchard? But my librarian daughter Anna recommended it, and if you’ve read my blog long, you know that in itself is a good reason for selecting a book. I did maintain some reservations since it is set in the Pacific Northwest, and Anna loves anything connected with that part of the country after living the early part of her married life in Oregon.

By page 19, I found even the descriptions worth relishing, and I knew I was into a good book. “Before he reached the town the sun was high and rinsing the standing wheatfields, quiet but for the resplendent slushing . . . A few wisps of cloud in the sky posed silently.”

I related to Angelene, as will other readers, “The other chief love – and how similar it was to science, and how different – was reading. As soon as she realized that figures on the page meant something – could be strung together as words, and then sentences, and then paragraphs – she was covetous of the whole system.”

Unfortunately, I also relate to the author’s view of people, “The man shook his head, incredulous, disgusted, but also delighted in the way that people are often delighted by bad news, or the opportunity to discuss bad news that does not immediately affect them.”

And have I not been where Della was? “There was something she had just remembered or wanted to remember; she did not want to forget it, and at the time of remembering it, it had seemed impossible that she would ever forget it, but now she had forgotten it.”

The book is deceptive in that it feels like a quiet book taking the reader along on the internal and external stories of Talmadge, Della, Caroline, and Angelene until one nears the end. Looking back, the reader realizes it has been a tale begun in abuse and rifled with problems – loss, suicide, revenge, attempted murder, and struggle to find normality within the cycles of the orchard. Caroline sums it up toward the end, “He has got it into his mind that he is to be the savior of that girl, and it won’t let him alone. He is going to die of it – “

About the time I reached the three quarters mark of the book, I saw on a newsfeed that The Orchardist  had won first place in Barnes and Noble’s Discover Award, honoring great new writers. I agree with their choice, but I did jazz up the cover picture for my blog by adding in a few apples.