Hour of the Bees

What could be worse for twelve-year-old Carol, needing to spend her summer in pool parties and sleepovers that will cement relationships for school in the fall, than to find out she must go with her family to the New Mexico desert for the summer? So begins Lindsay Eagar’s debut novel Hour of the Bees. Add Serge, a grandfather with dementia who can no longer live alone, and her dad’s mission to sell the ranch and move his father into a home where he will receive care. Also add a bossy older half-sister, not Serge’s biological granddaughter, who figures out ways not to pull her share of the load and a younger brother that often becomes Carol’s responsibility. The project of getting the property ready for sale will steal her summer. Carol reluctantly prepares herself for the ordeal by studying the brochure on what to expect from someone with dementia.

Strange magical twists come for Carol – not “Caro-leeen-a” as Serge insists she must be called in order to honor her Spanish roots.  Carol recognizes the “word salad” typical of his dementia from her brochure, but not the magical bees connected to the hundred-year drought, a seed, and most of all the story that Serge tells in segments, beginning each stage with “Once upon a time . . .”

Two story lines have different voices. The first covers the very realistic problem of cleaning out a lifetime of stuff and memories to get Serge ready to move and the property read to sell, told in a narrative fashion that keeps the reader interested. The second story-within-the-story of the bees, the magical tree, and the community that used them up is told in a lyrical voice – worth reading just for the beauty of the language.

I read the last page of the book several days ago, but saying I finished it would be misleading. My mind returns to keeping family ties through diminished mental capacities, to knowing the importance of family roots, and to empathizing with Carolina who did the wrong thing for right reasons. Most of all, I like her perspective, “There is no ending because stories never end. They just turn into new beginnings, forever and ever. Like the rings of a tree trunk.”

Not Your Regular Mother

In the sentimental look toward Mother’s Day, we sometimes get caught up in a stereotype of aromas from the kitchen, perfectly kept houses, acquiescent attitudes, and servile self-sacrifice to family whims. Trust me, that wasn’t Mama. My first memories go back to about the time this photograph was taken, We were a family of five with a dog – Daddy, Mama, three sisters, and Poochie, the fourth sister yet to come.

Not long after this, Mama took it upon herself to convince the school system, before the days of public kindergarten, that I needed to learn to read (at five), and they needed to let me enroll to help their student count. They refused, pointing out the Magic-Age-of-Six Law when all children should learn to read. Acquiescent, she was not. To mollify her, they loaned her a first grade reader, and she took charge of her illiterate five-year-old. I won’t go into how this messed up their system the next year when I entered school as an avid reader.

The servile self-sacrifice and perfectly kept house surrendered to a child-rearing principle important to Mama. Believing her mission to be that of making her four girls self-sufficient and responsible, the floors were as well-swept, the furniture as well-dusted, and the dishes as well-washed as girls, who were assigned the chores, did them. (Not that she didn’t occasionally decide a task wasn’t done well enough and send a lackadaisical girl back to do it over.)

As for the kitchen aromas, quite often they were of butter beans scorching on the bottom of the pan. She never convinced us that it was only the bottom beans that burned. Meals were well-balanced and healthy, but only on days when there were chicken and dumplings or some kind of fruit cobbler would we describe the aroma and taste as good.

Mama preferred digging in the vegetable and flower garden, chauffeuring Daddy who was too visually handicapped to drive, or chatting with church parishioners over spending time in the kitchen. Consequently, when I was nine, I requested permission to learn to cook. She agreed immediately, pointed me to the cookbook, and told me where she would be if I needed her. I don’t recall ever needing her. She had taught me to read!

The summer I was thirteen, she was back in school taking classes for teacher certification which left me cooking meals for six, reading to the youngest four-year-old sister, and keeping Daddy in starched and ironed white shirts – sometimes as many as three a day in pre air-conditioned Mississippi.

So I’ve just blown the sentimental Mother’s Day. Would I have traded? Let me put it this way, when I married at eighteen and a half, I knew how to cook, keep house, and tell stories to children. The class she took my thirteenth summer – Children’s Literature, which she shared with me when she came home, began what has become one of my great passions in life. Trade for a stereotype? I think not.

Retrospect

Some events give joy twice – once in the experience and again in retrospect as one relishes it and finds additional meaning. Such was this year’s Kaigler Children’s Book Festival. I will not say, though it is true, that this was the best one ever because I’ve been accused of saying that every year. (So far, and I’m up to sixteen, it’s been true every year, but I didn’t start this to justify my opinion.)

My “job” for the festival was to run my Honda taxi and get the people from the Keats Foundation to all the sessions. (It’s tough, but somebody has to do these things.) As we neared the end of the festival, one of the first-timer board members accurately appraised the event. He said, “The conference is a mix of heart and mind.”

I always look for good quotes and hints from festival speakers. No disappointment this year as you can see by a sampling:
• Joyce Sidman: “Read widely yourself. Choose books/poems you love. Read poems aloud to children.”
• Rita Williams Garcia: “Write a sentence from another author to see what it might have felt like to have written that sentence.”
• Melissa Sweet: “Success can be measured in what we’ve done or what we have, but success is really the ability to go to the studio and work each day.”

Celebrating the centennial of Ezra Jack Keats at the Keats Awards luncheon, I confess to a bit of pride as the opening video carried my byline. Deborah Pope, daughter of Keats’s lifelong friend Martin Pope and executive director of the Keats Foundation, gave a professional and personal Keats lecture. She opened with a poignant picture of Keats propping his arm on her head when he vacationed with her family in her childhood and with her claim to be his first biographer. She wrote his story for a school assignment right after he won the Caldecott Medal for The Snowy Day and told the teacher her sources were original.

I enjoyed these carefully planned and executed events as I mulled over something Deborah said as we set out to the first session. “My advice to board members coming for the first time is go with the flow. Some of the best things are unplanned.”

She was right. One may see old friends first met when they were student volunteers finishing library degrees who are now returning library science professors or nerdy friends like yourself coming for their annual children’s book fix. An unexpected author or illustrator dinner companion may be someone whose work you’ve admired. You might watch Keats Award winners form a bond among themselves, and the storyteller may turn you into a listening child once again.

Next year – best again? Well, Kate DiCamillo is receiving the USM Medallion for her body of work so it’s just possible. I have my calendar marked for April 5-7, 2017!

Whoosh!

Lonnie’s rocket invention drew a crowd of schoolmates to watch on the playground. His fuel creation caused his mother to send him outside when it caught fire in the kitchen! Whoops! At least, she didn’t make him quit experimenting. 

The team of Chris Barton and Don Tate missed the memo that nonfiction is dry and boring. Together again after The Amazing Age of John Roy Lynch, they tell the story of Lonnie Johnson in their new book Whoosh, which I read in an advance reading copy furnished by Net Galley. They use words and illustrations woven seamlessly together to add child-appealing humor without compromising the struggles Lonnie faced to fulfill his dreams. A crucial highlight in the book is the way Lonnie Johnson proves wrong the prediction of the exam that he is unlikely to make a good engineer.

The Barton/Tate Team recounts Lonnie’s many recognized achievements in the technical world, including work with NASA scientists. Children who've paid attention to the cover will enjoy the book even before they get to what they’ve been waiting for – the fun comes when Whoops! becomes Whoosh! in the making of the extraordinary water gun that they recognize and may have played with. Then Engineer Lonnie must become Promoter Lonnie or the product will never get into the market and the hands of children.

A bonus for teachers is the author’s note with the opportunity to discuss with students the importance of primary sources as Chris tells about talking to Lonnie Johnson and others who had firsthand knowledge of the story.

This is a book for any child or child-at-heart who loves to see how discoveries are made, to have a good laugh, or to see success follow failure.

Lest you question my praise of this book to be released May 3, since both Chris Barton and Don Tate are friends, Kirkus also gave it a starred review. 

Transients

For most of my life, moving from place to place has been the norm. I grew up in the years when rural Baptist pastors moved every three years or so, and my father was no exception. Then I married, expecting to spend the rest of my life in the little community of Furrs about ten miles from Tupelo, MS, perhaps best known outside the region for being the birthplace of Elvis Presley. Four years later, my husband was drafted. In this case, the Army put a square peg in a square hole, and a whole career ensued with more moves than Baptist preachers.

Looking back, I wouldn’t trade either section of my life for one more stable, but I often found it hard to uproot and start over. I liked the place and the people I was leaving.

When I read the book Sarah, Plain and Tall, Sarah put words to my feelings. Anna, the narrator, worries that her prospective stepmother will decide to return to her family in Maine. She’s afraid Sarah misses her home and family too much out on the prairie with little company besides the two children and their father until she overhears a conversation between Sarah and her new friend Maggie. Sarah wisely says, “There is always something to miss, no matter where you are.”

I thought about that last week as I was reminded of something I missed (besides the people) in our last home in Leesville, LA near Ft. Polk where we spent nineteen years, the longest stay of our marriage. Al retired from the Army after our first five years there to work in the post office so I could finally keep a job I loved in a community that felt like home.

Our Leesville yard was a stopping ground for a band of indigo buntings that traveled through every year. One year I went so far as to write a haiku about them.

               Feasting in the yard

            An indigo bunting crowd

               Sprinkled with cardinals

For the almost fifteen years we have been here, I’ve missed them in the spring. The indigo buntings are also transients, on their way to somewhere else. Last week, a miracle happened, and a flock found my yard again. A few days later, they were on their way. I enjoyed the respite, complete with cardinals who stay year round and consider this their permanent home. I hope the travelers spread the word that gourmet food is served at the Butler Bunting Inn with an easy on and off exit for buntings on the move. As for me, I plan to be right here where my roots are growing deep, waiting for their return.

Only in Naples

Only in Naples: Lessons in Food and Famiglia from My Italian Mother-in-Law hints of upcoming recipes. Chapter titles (Pasta e Fagioli, Gelato alla Nocciola, and Insalata di Polipo) add confirmation of Italian repasts to come. Remembering a long ago Italian landlady named Jenny who thought she adopted us when we rented her upstairs apartment, I was ready to read.

Lines from Katherine Wilson’s introduction foretold that more than recipes would follow. Referring to Greek mythological sirens hanging out on the rocky cliffs near Naples, she says, “I did not arrive in Naples tied to a mast. I arrived on a packed Delta flight from Washington, D. C. in the fall of 1996 . . . I saw Naples and started to live.”

Having come to the city to intern at the US consulate, Katherine gets more than she expected as she meets a good-looking scholar named Salvatore. When he introduces her to his mother Raffaella and the entire Avallone family, the fun begins.

I sometimes wondered as I read whether she was falling in love with Salvatore, the food, the beauty of Naples, or Raffaella’s irrepressible personality. The answer was probably “all of the above” as she makes her way through a different life in Naples. Katherine’s lighthearted voice as she embraces new customs, foods, and traditions brings the reader on her journey that outlasts the internship as those things with which she falls in love bring attachment to her new Italian environment and family.

The recipes take a while to show up, but there they are near the end with directions embroidered by Raffaella’s voice and instructions. The complicated and time-consuming recipes may not send you to the kitchen, but they will entertain.

If you need angst and trauma in a memoir, this one is not for you. On the other hand, if you love good food, a fine romance, and laughter, you don’t want to miss it.

Prepare for Poem in Your Pocket Day!

Fittingly, the “Put a Poem in Your Pocket Day” comes right in the middle of poetry month. In case you hadn’t heard about either the day or the month, I’m posting today so you will have time to get your pocket poem ready for Thursday.

The day coincides with the third McGee girl birthday on April 21. That has nothing to do with pocket poems, but happy birthday to Gwyn, anyway.

I’m sharing the poem I have ready to put in my pocket to be pulled out and read during the day Thursday. It comes from Joyce Sidman’s Newbery Honor winning book Dark Emperor and Other Poems of the Night. I chose it because I have a beloved oak tree in my back yard. The tree has its flaws, and we’ve been warned since we came here that it needed to go. I’ll let you guess which tree was still standing after those around it fell to Hurricane Katrina’s winds and greened up nicely again this spring more than ten years later. In its honor and thanks to Joyce, here is my pocket poem that I will be carrying on the 21^st. She calls it “Oak After Dark.”

As nighttime rustles at my knee,

I stand in silent gravity

and quietly continue chores

of feeding leaves and sealing pores.

While beetles whisper in my bark,

while warblers roost in branches dark,

I stretch my roots into the hill

and slowly, slowly drink my fill.

A thousand crickets scream my name,

yet I remain the same, the same.

I do not rest, I do not sleep,

and all my promises I keep:

to stand while all the seasons fly,

to anchor earth,

       to touch the sky.

Joyce has multitudes of other poems in her other award-winning books in case you are short of sources for your own pocket poem.

Politician Report Card?

“Plays well with others” ranked high in importance for me as I marked report cards and for the parents who received them when I taught kindergarten. I’ve been looking for politicians during this mad election season who would have received a “U” (usually) or even an “S” (sometimes). Unfortunately, what I have seen most of the time would have had me marking an “N” (never).

“Legislative ‘odd couple’ forms bond,” a recent inside page headline in The Hattiesburg American, via The Clarion-Ledger, brought me up short. It seems that first-termers Joel Bomgar, described as conservative Republican, and Kabir Karriem, described as liberal Democrat have formed a bond over the need to reform the criminal justice system and end mass incarceration. The article goes on to talk about how they are seriously working together on this crucial issue. It recounts their efforts to get out into communities this summer to communicate what can be done and to draft legislation together in the fall.

Who knew that legislators could still work together to accomplish good for our state or nation? That is so rare that I would have moved the headline to the front page! As a self-labeled independent voter, I have been searching, without much success, for those who learned the lesson of “playing well with others” in kindergarten. At the moment, neither of these Mississippi legislators is in my district, so I can’t even vote for them if they run for reelection. However, who knows what the future holds? I’ve made myself a note that they are willing to talk across the aisle for the common good so I don’t forget in case either of them ever seeks a statewide office.

I’ve avoided the political fray for the most part in my blog. I have friends from one end of the political spectrum to the other, and I can’t buy into the current attitude that those who disagree with me are evil nor work myself into hatred, even for the politicians who behave more like spoiled brats than like statesmen. I continue my search, which has been about as successful as Diogenes search for an honest man, for those who can get beyond their labels and work together to solve the problems in our society. I am grateful for this small light in a very dark tunnel.

Happy 100th birthday, Beverly Cleary!

Let me join the parade of people wishing Beverly Cleary a happy 100th birthday on April 12. Not that she herself is taking it too seriously. She’s been quoted as saying about this century mark, “Go ahead and fuss. Everyone else is,” and “I didn’t do it on purpose.”

Still, it would seem ungrateful of me not to notice when she turned so many of my own second graders into independent readers. After I read Beezus and Ramona, they clamored for the next book in the series. “Sorry,” I said, “I have more good authors to read. If you want another Ramona book, you’ll have to read it yourself.”

My students were keyed up for their next weekly scheduled class trip to the school library (the only way that librarian worked, but that is another story for another time). They attended to the librarian’s lesson at the beginning of the period as well as they could with something else on their minds. The minute she released them to find their books, they landed on the Cleary shelves like a horde of locusts and picked the shelves clean.

A few weeks ensued with my students checking those books in only to have them checked back out by another member of the class who had been hovering nearby until the librarian stamped it. The librarian made a new rule. With ten or so other second grades, not to mention third and fourth, she found herself not having any Cleary books for the rest of the school so she set a limit on how many could be in my classroom at any given time.

Not to be outwitted, my students checked out their limit, supplemented them with the ones I owned, and swapped among themselves until their next trip to the library.

They never guessed that their teacher might have had an ulterior motive. I’ve long believed that the most likely way to make a good reader is to turn a child onto books. Avid practice in reading is not unlike avid practice in riding a bicycle to make the skill effortless.

So on this 100th  recurrence of the date of Beverly Cleary’s birth, I add my happy birthday wishes to the multitude of others who have loved Ramona Quimby, Henry Huggins, Ellen Tebbits, and Ralph S. Mouse.  I also add special thanks for creating book hunger in my students that made me look like a really good reading teacher!

Desert Beauty

When I consider the desert, my first thoughts don’t run to beauty. Trips to Arizona to visit our oldest son’s family continue to surprise me.

It doesn’t matter if we land in Phoenix or Tucson (a decision based on the mundane question of cost), as we hear the “get ready for landing” announcement from the cockpit, I take a peek out the window. The stark charcoal mountains silhouetted against clear blue sky are nothing short of amazing.

 

Traveling on our way or walking through their neighborhood, flowers stubbornly insist on blooming in the arid climate. Here and there, they dot the landscape in dazzling white or brilliant color.

 

 

Side by side with the flowers, tough cacti sport their own blooms amidst their thorns.

 

Growing among the backyard palms, enhanced with a bit of irrigation, we find limes and a day’s abundant pepper harvest.

 
Oh, and let’s not forget those roses!

Beauty continues inside, though truth to tell, daughter-in-law Stephannie would make her famous buckeyes no matter where she lived.

In spite of my understanding that the desert has a beauty all its own, I’ve not been tempted to relocate. This time of year, I look out my back windows into a wall of every hue of green in my Mississippi woods – pine, sweet gum, hickory nut, oaks . . . 

 

Arizona – it really is nice place to visit.

Miller's Valley

All it took was seeing Anna Quindlen’s name on the offer from Net Galley for me to click the “request” button for Miller’s Valley. Coincidentally, I read the Feb/March issue of AARP Magazine as I neared the end of the book. It published a short blurb where Anna describes her fascination with Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield. She admires his span of coverage from child to adult, his details that built a world, and his social consciousness – exactly what I had found in her book.

From the first line of the prologue, “It was a put-up job, and we all knew it by then,” the reader senses the inevitable as people from the government’s Valley Federal Recreation Area seeks views from the public before doing what they intended to do in the first place. There will be no surprise by the time late in the story when she says, “They’d gone from talking about taking people’s homes to giving people jobs, from eminent domain to tourism.”

Against that predictable backdrop, Mimi Miller’s story unwinds from the child eavesdropping on her parents through her adulthood. The theme of loss – one brother to a richer life and another to prison, a best friend to California, the cattle to pasture loss, her father to a stroke, and the land to the water – threads its way to a new normal.

Predictable government operations contrast with the vagaries of people rubbing their own goals against each other in unexpected twists and turns. The ending like a jigsaw puzzle, complete except for that one small missing piece, satisfies with Mimi’s philosophy, “Maybe everyone stays the same inside, even when their life looks nothing like what they had, or even imagined.”

If you, like me, are already an Anna Quindlen fan, Miller’s Valley will not disappoint. If you haven’t read her yet (the only reason I can imagine that you are not a fan), this book is a good place to start.

April Fool's Favorite

With the exception of my annual piece for the date closest to Christmas, I don’t repeat a blog often, but since today is April Fool’s Day, I couldn’t resist repeating my all-time favorite prank. 

My favorite April Fool's 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 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 Fool's 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 young African-American male and a 40-year-old 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 in one of their classes 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 Fool's joke when I insisted on being called “Mr. Jackson.”

Mr. Jackson reported second graders had 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. I had not alerted Mr. Jackson to problem students, knowing he was quite capable of handling whatever happened. With Henry’s schoolwide reputation, I knew he would be aware of the potential. I’d just given Mr. Jackson a list of my routines and my lesson plans. He planned to pick out Henry on his own, making 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 exchanged back 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!

Once Was a Time

Time travel with a twist adds to the incredibility of Leila Sales book, Once Was a Time. Lottie, the protagonist narrator, admits right from the start that few people believe in time travel. Then the author makes it more unbelievable by having her protagonist travel forward in time rather than to an unknown world like the classic Wrinkle in Time or backwards like the book I recently reviewed, Into the Dim.

Lottie’s father, a scientist in the 1940 wartime London, is on the verge of discovering the mysteries of time travel that may save the world from the Nazis. This makes him a person of interest to both British and German governments which leads to the kidnapping of Lottie and her friend Kitty. They are locked in a cellar to coerce the father to reveal his secrets where Lottie spots the brief portal for time travel and escapes, without her friend, to a small Wisconsin town in 2013.

The rest of the book is driven by Lottie’s guilt for not holding onto Kitty’s hand long enough to assure that she would also came through and her search for a way to reconnect with Kitty while dealing with a world filled with fashions, technology, and ideas that are strange to her.

Middle grade time travel fans will likely not be concerned that Lottie is more worried about locating Kitty than about finding her parents or her two siblings, nor will they worry about the coincidences that lead her search. They will enjoy the humor, suspense, and endless anagrams. Loving nothing more than additional incredibility, they will enjoy the twist of traveling forward in time.

Lessons from Lady Bears

One might think the hours I’ve spent in the last few weeks watching the Lady Baylor Bears would be a waste of time. This waste would have been much bigger if the networks had shown all their games or had not switched over one time to another game that they found more “interesting” shortly after the half. [Never mind that the Lady Bears had the game sewed up by halftime. It was the game promised in the TV guide and was more interesting to me.] 

One can actually learn quite a few lessons that I’d like to pass along – just to justify my addiction to the team. Like Aesop, I will draw a moral for each of these. 

1. The players take as much satisfaction in passing the ball to the teammate with the best shot as in scoring. Moral: In most accomplishments in life, others have passed the ball, run interference, or cheered the goalmaker on. The glory belongs to all. 

2. A dependable starter who makes a bad play is given a turn on the bench with Coach Mulkey. Moral: Life has consequences when we live it wrong. We have to expect to take our lumps when we mess up.

3. This benched player was sent back into the game soon and got a another chance. She returned with renewed energy to make up for her mistake. Moral: Once the price for a bad choice is paid, let it go, and get out there to play twice as hard.  

4. In a previous coaching life, Kalani Brown’s mother left Coach Mulkey’s team to get married before she finished her college basketball career. The coach called on the mother to repay her debt with her daughter. Her coach and parents have enjoyed watching Kalini’s expertise played out on the court. Moral: Paying debts brings satisfaction.

5. Nina Davis at 5’11” comes in short for a basketball player. Her court play is scrappy and her shooting style unorthodox. She says she taught the shooting style to herself. I find her free throw shooting adds interest to the game since conventional wisdom says she can’t get the ball though the basket from that position, but she does. She may be my favorite player. Moral: Approaching challenges in our own individual manner may work better than doing things the way everybody else does, and certainly will be more interesting.

 

So there you have it. My entire reason for watching the Lady Bears is that it makes me a better person. I need all the help as I can get in that department so I’m pulling for them to go all the way to Indianapolis on April 3. Sic ‘em, Bears!

The Summer Before the War

Show me a historical novel set in England in 1914 and my resistance lasts about as long as if you turned your back and left me in a room with an opened box of chocolates. The ARC of The Summer Before the War by Helen Simonson, furnished by Net Galley, took me back to that time and place.

The writer’s voice, setting, and characters have that English novel feel. Beatrice Nash arrives in East Sussex after her father’s death to find her way in the world. His encouragement and influence has left her a strong young woman pursuing an unlikely female career as a freethinking Latin teacher with the unladylike desire to write. Conversely, he has left her inheritance tied up with grasping relatives to the point that she is virtually penniless.

The author’s research lends authenticity to the mores of the community and time. In an interview reprinted from Library Journal, which I read after I finished the book, she discusses her portrayal of the Gypsies (Roma) in Rye at the time. As the editor for Amoun Sleem’s memoir, A Gypsy Dreaming in Jerusalem, I was struck with how accurately she portrayed and individualized the Gypsy people in that community, the importance of the role they play in her story, and the honesty of the prejudice against them by most of the locals. Her quote in the interview rang true, “I hoped to highlight that the English Romanies have been part of local history as long as anyone else and that Romany men served their country in the war alongside their fellow British men.”

The Summer Before the War, on sale March 22, is a good read for a day at the beach, an afternoon on the porch swing with rain on the roof, or any day when you’d like to be whisked back into early twentieth century England. Do be aware that the title is a bit of a misnomer since the book goes on past summer – as it should.

Revisiting the Dimestore

I said in my Monday blog that I knew dimestores like the one Lee Smith wrote about in her book. I remembered going in with my small change and trolling thorough the treasures to see if I wanted a bottle of bubbles, a set of jacks, or a Hershey bar. I smelled the tempting cashews roasting as they turned in the big container next to the checkout. Of course that leads to a story, (not a lie, like the ones she mentioned).

Al, in his first overseas assignment with the Army, sent a letter that he had found us an apartment in Paris. Murray and I had been waiting, and now he would have his first birthday the week we arrived. I made plans for our first plane trip. This entailed a trip to the dimestore for several items, but one of great importance.

I asked the owner, “Mrs. Page, do you carry a child harness?”

Mrs. Page had known my husband all of his life and had known me for at least half of mine. Feeling free to pass judgment and give advice, she said, “Yes, but I don’t believe in using them.”

I knew an explanation was necessary before she would tell me where to find one. “I’m going to be flying through New York and will be spending a good bit of layover time in that big airport. Murray will talk to anybody and will go off with them if they appear to be going somewhere that’s fun. I need to have him on a harness so he can run around but I don’t lose him.” I added, “I’m never going to use it again.”

Relief covered her face and Mrs. Page admitted it was probably a good idea to have the harness for the trip. She didn’t want me losing Murray either. She told me where to find it and sold it to me.

A few weeks later she would see his picture in the county paper, taken by a TWA photographer in that airport, and feel the pride that she had facilitated his not getting lost. I kept my promise and never used it again.

Dimestores have all but disappeared to be replaced by Dollar Stores where owners and clerks check your purchases without judgment or parenting advice. Sometimes I miss Mrs. Page.

Dimestore

There’s something about Appalachia that brings out tales. Lee Smith grew up in a mining town in the Appalachian Mountains in southwest Virginia where she says a lie was called a “story” with little distinction between them. That idea traveled south along the ridges of those mountains right down to where I grew up in its foothills in north Mississippi. I, too, heard when the possibility arose that I might be in trouble, “Now, don’t you be telling me a story.”

Dimestore, Lee’s book recommended by a friend with the advance reading copy furnished by Net Galley, begins, “I was born in a rugged ring of mountains in southwest Virginia – mountains so high, so straight up and down, that the sun didn’t hit our yard until about eleven o’clock.” The language of the first chapter had me tripping merrily with her back in time with rural places and people. I settled in for a cheerful return to the stories told on porches on long summer afternoons. My first impression lasted through her eavesdropping on adult conversations sprinkled with, “never been quite right,” “bless her heart,” or “kindly nervous” – a euphemism for mental illness. I’d heard them all in my own eavesdropping years. I knew the dimestores like her father’s where these conversations might take place.

The cheer never quite leaves but becomes mingled with other emotions as she describes her father’s bouts with depression, her mother’s “kindly nervous” episodes, and being taken in and cared for by other relatives when both parents’ problems occurred simultaneously.

I’ll not spoil your reading with the rest of the story, but the emotional journey told in the style of the porch stories includes laughter, heartbreak, hope, disappointment, and love. If I had to choose a theme, I would cite this quote from the book, “Writing cannot bring our loved ones back, but it can sometimes fix them in our fleeting memories as they were in life, and it can always help us make it through the night.”

My best advice? Don’t delay. Rush right out to reserve a copy at your local independent book store or click your account to have it delivered to your reading device when it goes on sale March 22.

Happy 100th to Ezra!

One hundred years ago today, a baby was born with a number of strikes against him.
•    He was premature and spent his first days in an incubator.
•    His parents were immigrant Jews who had fled Poland in the time of the pogroms.
•    Poverty pervaded his neighborhood even before the Great Depression came as he began his teenage years.
•    Poor health began early and would dog his childhood.

Babies are hard to predict. This one came with a gift and was given a prophetic name. They named him Ezra which means helper. He began to draw on the linoleum floor with his crayons while he was still a toddler.

A blog is not nearly long enough to trace the struggles or the opportunities that came his way, but two were particularly significant. In junior high, he found a lifelong friend with the nickname of “Itz,” and he discovered the library with an abundance of art books that he could use to teach himself to paint.

Skipping much trouble and triumph, we come to the publication of his book The Snowy Day in 1962. This first full color picture book to feature a black child in a non-stereotypical fashion won the Caldecott Medal and the hearts of children. Ezra followed with many other books portraying the diversity he saw out his Brooklyn window.

His legacy has continued after his death in 1983 with the Ezra Jack Keats Foundation, administered by his old friend Itz, now known as Martin Pope, and the Pope family. One of its major activities continues to support diversity in children’s literature. The annual presentation of the Ezra Jack Keats New Writer and New Illustrator Awards at the Fay B. Kaigler Book Festival will be on April 7. The celebration will honor promising new writers and illustrators who share his vision of diversity, family, and childhood.

Ezra Jack Keats, a helper indeed, opened our own windows to a diverse world. Who would have dreamed in 1916 what a difference the life of that premature baby would make? Happy 100th birthday, Ezra!

Maybe a Fox

A different kind of book seems to call for a different kind of review. When I began to see posts about prolific authors Kathi Appelt and Alison McGhee writing a book together, I was curious. Since I can’t really imagine creating fiction with anybody else, I wondered how it would turn out. I requested the advance reading copy from Net Galley of Maybe a Fox, to be released on March 8.

Hoping my blog readers are also curious, I am doing this review as a Q and A.

Q: How did they divide up the work?

A: According to an interviews I’ve read in several places, each of them first wrote separate chapters for the fox and girl, emailing them back and forth, then worked together simultaneously using Google Doc. At one point they met in Texas for revision. Both revised the book solo. This very condensed version of the process took place over several years.

Q: Does the writing jerk back and forth between their two voices?

A: I had to think hard for the answer to this one and started to give myself a different question. Fortunately, I went to a Backdoor Coffeehouse concert and figured it out. I am fairly familiar with Alison’s work and very familiar with Kathi’s and could hear their distinctive voices as I read. Still the book was a unit. It was like a duet when a soprano and alto sing together. You can hear each voice, yet there is one song, made more beautiful as the voices blend.

Q: Were the two voices distracting?

A: Rather than distracting, I felt like I was listening to two friends give an account of an adventure that mingles real life sadness and struggle with a fantasy world as each interrupts the other to carry their part of the story.

Q: Who will enjoy the book?

A: I would recommend it to middle schoolers and to those who have not lost their ability to relate to a shadow world where foxes have emotions and thoughts, to those who like a book cloaked in the sadness of two sisters who have lost their mother, and to those who understand the need to disobey a father’s warning to stay away from the river when there is a dire need to throw in a wish rock.

Q: Since I’ve seen how this can work, am I going to try writing with a partner?

A: Not likely

Spring Song

Storms of lightning, rain, and thunder
Bring forth spring in all its wonder.

Snowflakes gone, except for these –
Flowers wafting in the breeze.

Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Redbud and dogwood, if you please.

Twin squirrels chase each other’s tail.
Daffodils push up without fail.

Bluets pop up here and there,
Tiny blossoms with faces fair.

Weeds grow beside the door.
Those, I will just ignore.

Anole runs across the rail.
Wonder what happened to his tail?

No clock alarm, just spring bird’s song,
Calling the mate he’ll find ere long

I’m ready for spring, if you please,
Even the pollen that makes me sneeze.