It’s so hot today, and after yesterday’s bibliotherapy, I found myself thinking about sticky inner-city days when I was a kid growing up in south Akron. We had an old white porch swing for awhile and it was my favorite reading spot until it came crashing down one memorable day. After that I either had to choose between a webbed aluminum lawn chair, or the banister. Clearly, the banister was best. Not only was it wide enough for a skinny little kid to recline, but it provided a bird’s-eye view of the street in case anything interesting went on, which in the early days of my banister reading it did not. The later years more than made up for it, but THAT’S a whole other story. For now just add a lumpy cushion to prop against the porch pillar and there you have it – the place where I met magic.
Like most kids, I was deathly afraid of bees, but I’d be so lost in my book I’d barely register their buzzing amongst the fragrant white flowering bushes that didn’t quite come up to banister level, but almost did. I was too busy hanging out with Beezus and Ramona; Betsy, Tacy and Tib; Katie John; Jennifer Hill; the Moffats; the All-of-a-Kind Family; and Carolyn Haywood's gang -- Betsy, Star, Billy, Eddie, Penny, and Peter. Oh, and Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women too, especially Jo, but of course that’s no surprise. More than a hundred years after Alcott brought her to life, tomboy Jo March is STILL the Popular Girl.
The thing about kid books is they’re such sneaky little devils. They get you when you’re young, lodge in your brain, nestle in your heart, and somehow become part of who you are. You think you’ve forgotten some of them, but then something will happen and from nowhere you’ll remember a scene, or a snippet of dialogue, and wonder where in the world it came from. Last week when I saw Ginger Pye by Eleanor Estes in a paperback reprint at the neighborhood garage sale a rush of remembered pleasure came over me to the point that I actually squealed with delight and told the young mom standing next to me how great it was. I knew I’d loved it, but I couldn’t quite grab hold of either the plot or the characters. All week that book niggled in the back of my brain and then this morning I moved a pile of books and what did I find but Ginger Pye in an old edition. Immediately, I sat down and read the first chapter and – wham, just like that! – I’m back on the banister vicariously living the lives of Rachel and Jerry Pye in their tall Victorian house in Cranbury, Massachusetts. But it’s what I read on page eight that nearly toppled me off my revolving office chair.
“Rachel had the Secret Garden from the library and Jerry had one of the Altshelter books, and neither one of these books was an “I” book. They both always opened a book eagerly and suspiciously, looking first to see whether it was an “I” book. If it were they would put it aside, not reading it until there was absolutely nothing else.”
So THAT’s where I got the phrase “I books!” I remember telling my kids when they were young that when I was little I never liked the “I” books.
It makes me crazy the way people denigrate children’s authors by implying that “anyone” could write a children’s book. Back when I was writing and teaching creative writing at conferences there was always a contingency of conference goers who felt that writing children’s books was a little “less than.” I begged to differ then and I beg to differ now. Children’s books are the first stories we hear. We come to them as malleable as Play-Doh, so new and clean and shiny, each sporting our own bright color and each anxious to figure out the world beyond our family, our street, our school. We bend ourselves this way and that, trying out different shapes and textures. We laugh, cry, worry, tremble with fear, jump through every emotional hoop a favorite author rolls our way. The stories that most resonate with our deepest selves attach themselves to our bones and sinew and become our own. The rest fly away on Shel Silverstein's "peppermint wind" leaving behind small gifts -- a flash of humor, a quirky character, an unforgettable image.
I believe that children's books are treasures that will never, ever translate successfully to the electronic screen. We need to hold them, prop them on our knees, dogear their pages if we don't have a bookmark, hug them, maybe even drip orange pospicles on them. The connection between child and book is visceral, MUST be visceral if it's to matter for a lifetime. And it does matter. It intensely, emotionally, psychically matters, which is why adults buy children's books for themselves. We want to go back, maybe need to go back to the banister and hold again the precious books that introduced us to ourselves.
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