Tag: authors

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Seeing Small

Everyone in my family has a favorite moment from the girls on Klickitat Street.

For Mom, it will forever be the image of a kindergarten teacher saying “Sit here for the present,” and a young girl spending all day wondering what her present will be.

For me, it’s the inevitable confusion of directions while trying to drive to an appointment. “Do I turn left?” “Right.” (Turns right) “MOTHER! You were supposed to turn left!”

For Heather, it’s the image of a young force of nature sullenly declaring “I am TOO a merry sunshine!”

For all these and a thousand more, we have Beverly Cleary to thank. Even if we can no longer do so in person.

For those who missed the news, the beloved children’s author and one-time librarian died recently at the did-I-really-type-that age of 104. She left behind shelves full of stories and more than a few autographed cards from retired library card catalogs. But if there’s just one thing that carries her legacy, it has to be the stories of Ramona Quimby and her family.

It’s not just that the stories are funny or touching or familiar, though they’re all of that with a hard-boiled egg on top. It’s that Clearly had one of the rarest gifts that an adult can have – the ability to truly remember how a child sees the world.

It’s harder than you think.

Oh, we chuckle at the amusing things children say or shake our head exasperatedly at the strange things they do. These days we even make internet memes out of the most striking ones. But what so many of us forget is that to a child, these moments are neither amusing nor thoughtless. They come from thoughts that are just as rational as any adult’s – it’s just that the reason is based on much less experience and very different assumptions and priorities.

So to a Ramona, it makes perfect sense to lock the dog in the bathroom for stealing your cookie. After all, misbehaving kids get sent to their room, right?

In a Ramona world, it’s a reasonable conclusion that the national anthem’s verse about “the dawnzer lee light,” must mean some kind of lamp. After all, “dawnzer” isn’t any stranger than any other word the grownups use.

And when a favorite teacher tells you to go home until you can behave, it might as well be the end of the world. After all, if you were that bad, why should she ever forgive you?

That understanding of life from the smaller side of the street is one huge reason why Cleary’s stories have endured. And it’s a lesson of basic empathy that’s still needed, not just when dealing with children but with adults as well.

Which is why I’m gratified every time I find someone else who can see with Cleary’s eyes.

My wife Heather speaks “child” better than any adult I know. When she’s confronted with a child making a big deal over a small thing, she never lets her amusement show in her eyes – however tempting it may be. To them, she knows, it’s serious.

A nurse we met recently had to deal with our protesting, struggling Missy who was NOT eager to be poked with a vaccine needle, however important it might be. At a time when it would have been easy to be impatient and move to the next appointment, she met Missy with friendliness and understanding. (And some impressive arm speed.) To Missy, she knew, it was frightening.

When all of us meet all of us, it’s not always easy to understand, even when we’ve been there ourselves. Not easy – but oh, so essential.

The books are done. The lessons remain. May we retain them well.

In a world where so much is veiled in confusion, there’s still a need to see Cleary.

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The Doctor and the Professor

In some ways, the Doctor and the Professor couldn’t seem more different.

The Doctor looked toward a fantastic future, built among the stars and shared with a race of mechanical men. The Professor looked toward a mythical past, sheltered amidst the trees and hills and shared with beings older than mankind.

One wrote at high speed in a utilitarian style that kept the stories coming and coming. The other labored over each word, considering the history of every drop of color and whisper of wind.

And for fans of the fantastic like myself, the New Year hasn’t really started without them. Dr. Isaac Asimov, one of the biggest names in science fiction, born January 2. Professor J.R.R. Tolkien, the godfather of modern fantasy, born January 3.

Am I geeking out here? Maybe just a little. But it really is just that cool.

Part of it, of course, is memory. My love for Tolkien was born in elementary school, reinforced by many hobbit-filled reading nights with my dad where we delighted in every new character and voice. (I still envy Dad’s booming Treebeard, just as I think he always appreciated my attempts at the hardworking Sam Gamgee’s accent.) Asimov’s work I met a little later, encouraged in part by a science teacher who felt that no robotics club was complete without the Good Doctor.

Obviously, I’ve got a lot of company – including the Doctor and the Professor themselves, as it turned out. Asimov was one of the few “modern” writers that Tolkien genuinely enjoyed reading; Asimov, for his part, once mentioned that he’d read The Lord of the Rings five times and was genuinely surprised when his own Foundation series beat it out for a Hugo award. But it’s more than pleasure and nostalgia.

The truth is, there couldn’t be a better way to start the year. Because in doing so, we look toward the truly human.

I know that sounds strange. Asimov solidified robots in the modern imagination, while Tolkien introduced us to hobbits and all their kin. But both writers, even in their most epic tales, built everything on the most simple and basic of human qualities.

In Tolkien’s Middle-Earth, the problems of the world aren’t solved by mighty armies and powerful leaders. Instead, it comes from the compassion and determination of simple folk, knowing they’re not up to the job, but doing their best for as long as they can.

In Asimov’s worlds of the future, the answers don’t come from vast armadas and epic battles – in fact, violence is mocked by one character as “the last resort of the incompetent.” Instead, the key is to use your reason to understand the world and the people around you, knowing that if you can see what the problem actually is, the solution may be simpler than you think.

Heart. Mind. An awareness that other people matter – whatever their origin –  and a disdain for the pride and hatred that often sets them apart.

We still need all of that today. Maybe now more than ever.

And if we let it be nothing more than a fantasy, then we’re writing ourselves a very dark tale, indeed.

So go ahead. Look to the promise of the future. Take heart in the legends of the past. And use the tales of both to see our present moment more clearly. That’s what will give us the humanity to reach beyond the threats and fear that haunt our times – to build a world together rather than destroy it apart.

It’s a vital lesson.

And it’s one the Doctor and the Professor are still waiting to teach.

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Train of Thought

Ever since the news, my inner Arlo Guthrie hasn’t stopped singing.

Writin’ on The City of New Orleans,

Simon & Schuster, Monday-morning rail,

It’s got 15 cars of would-be J.K. Rowlings,

Three pot-boilers, 25 plots so frail …

The occasion, of course, is Amtrak’s decision to begin a “writer’s residency” program aboard its trains. As in take a seat, hit the keys and type the miles away.

No charge.

It’s a rolling dream for a lot of writers, and not just because it’s free, though that word does hold a lot of power for the Order of the Smoking Word Processor. Anyone in the press knows that the best way to draw reporters isn’t to issue a release, it’s to serve free food — an observation that has broadened both coverage and waistlines.

But while a free train ride might hold some attractions by itself, the real draw is in what the train can bestow. Separation. Focus. Time.

Time, maybe most of all.

Every writer has their own idiosyncracies. Lewis Carroll wrote standing up, Truman Capote lying down. Mark Twain needed yellow paper, Rudyard Kipling demanded black ink, and Roald Dahl had to have his Dixon-Ticonderoga pencils. Isaac Asimov didn’t seem to need more than oxygen, and if he could have made his prose literally breathless, he’d probably be writing still.

But the one thing we all have to have, the one indispensable, is time.

Not time to write. That’s actually the easy part. Anyone who can spend three hours a day looking at cat pictures on the Internet can find a way to write a page or two. The time spent watching the last Super Bowl could have produced several anthologies — and arguably would have been more productively spent, especially for Manning and Co.

No, the hard part is the time to germinate. To let ideas lie fallow. To let your brain absent-mindedly chew on a thought, a thought that mingles with others and evolves like the monster in a B-movie, suddenly alive and demanding attention.

It’s important. And these days, it’s difficult. The absent mind has a plethora of things racing to fill it, from headline news to bacon jokes. We live in a sea of stimulus and interaction — great things for starting an idea, but not always so for nurturing it.

It’s like trying to plant a flower garden on the interstate. And daylilies versus Peterbilts was never a fair match.

And so — separation.

The retreat is an old idea, especially in religious tradition; to step away from the world for a while in order to refocus your mind and soul on what matters. Like most things, that deliberate loneliness gets more valuable as it gets harder to find. Not just for writers, either; who couldn’t use even 20 minutes to get away and let the mind be a field instead of an engine?

The Amtrak idea, of course, promises a lot more than 20 minutes. (Well, so long as the WiFi is turned off, anyway.) But while that’s attractive — OK, downright seductive — it doesn’t have to be that extreme. It can be an hour at night after everyone else has gone to bed. Or a weekend away. Or even an uneventful drive on a boring road, one of my favorite spots for musing on columns, fiction and intractable problems.

If you’ve ever been behind me in traffic, by the way, I do apologize. And I swear, that light was yellow when I entered the intersection.

Time set apart. Mind set apart. A chance to be quiet, even bored. That’s where souls are refreshed and ideas are born.

That’s priceless.

In fact, it’s worth volumes.

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Wild Thing

The first time I heard Maurice Sendak on the radio, I laughed my head off.

Impossible not to, really. Because while Sendak could be a cantankerous old coot, he was a fun cantankerous old coot. And really, how could you not like someone who admitted that the faces of his Wild Things came from childhood memories of his Brooklyn relatives?

“They came almost every Sunday and there was my week-long anxiety about their coming the next Sunday,” he told an interviewer. “They’d lean way over with their bad teeth and hairy noses and say something threatening like ‘You’re so cute I could eat you up.’ And I knew if my mother didn’t hurry up with the cooking, they probably would.”

Now, like his misbehaving Max, Sendak has sailed off on a journey of his own. A stroke closed the book at age 83.

I’m saying that about too many authors lately, aren’t I?

It’s a funny thing about Sendak, though. With most of my childhood writers and illustrators, I get a clear picture in my head, a portrait of their work and what it meant to me. With Sendak, the picture is more like a Magic Eye, one image hidden inside another.

Because while I knew Maurice Sendak as the man who knew “Where the Wild Things Are,” I also knew him as the illustrator of Little Bear.

Remember Little Bear? A little two-legged bear cub who always seemed slightly worn, where Mother and Grandmother and a host of friends were always close to hand. His stories were the softer ones of childhood, imagining a trip to the moon, or getting ready to play in the snow, or having a thank-you kiss passed to him from Grandmother Bear through a relay of half-a-dozen others.

A very different style from Max in his wolf suit.

Or maybe not.

Maybe, just maybe, Sendak had a more complete picture of childhood than most. He knew the gentle side, knew that there could be curiosity and learning and affection.

But he wouldn’t ignore the other side. The one where kids can be brats. Where children also argue with their parents, do what they shouldn’t, get lonely, get scared.

“I refuse to lie to children,” he told an interviewer for The Guardian.

“I think it’s unnatural to think that there is such a thing as a blue sky, white cloud and a happy childhood for anybody,” he said to NPR “Childhood is a very, very, tricky business of surviving it.”

Reading that, I can remember a few less lovely parts of my own childhood.

Like barricading my door against my sisters when I didn’t want them in my bedroom – or pestering them incessantly when I did.

Like my first and only schoolyard fight, which I waited almost two years to tell my family about. (I almost won … which is a nice way of saying I lost.)

Like the night I sat at the table, dinner uneaten, until Dad came home – and he worked late in those days.

Remembering those moments, Max resonates strongly. The moments where the real Wild Things woke up.

But Wild Things can be commanded and made to obey.

“And when he came to the place where the wild things are, they roared their terrible roars and gnashed their terrible teeth and rolled their terrible eyes and showed their terrible claws till Max said, ‘Be still’ and tamed them with the magic trick of staring into all their yellow eyes without blinking once.”

Don’t blink. Don’t ignore or pretend they aren’t there. Face them down … and in so doing, master them.

That may be one of the first, best lessons of growing up I know.

So thank you, Mr. Sendak. Thanks for both the sweet and the savage, the gentle and the crazy. It’s been a fun ride together.

In fact, it’s been pretty Wild.