Do Bee Good

Remember “Romper Room”? We watched it every day--which is saying something since my mom was rabidly anti-television. I was drawn to Romper Stompers, badgering my mom into making some with coffee cans and string. But the pivotal moment was always when the Magic Mirror came out. The picture is still sharp in my memory: all those lucky kids in the studio and exponentially more kids at home in an expectant semi-circle waiting to get “seen.” Miss Sally would hold that unique-in-all-the-world mirror up and it was magic because she could see all the children in the world. And then she would start calling some of them by name. “I see Billy, and Susie, and…” It seemed she would eventually see me. But she never did. Not once. I was an avid fan, wearing my Romper Stompers in the den to prove my loyalty. At first, I would even wave my arms, but when I got a little older I realized how childish that was. She just didn’t see me. The funny thing is, I seem to encounter a number of adults who felt similarly shunned, hearing only other names, not theirs. Who were all these kids that did get called then?! My husband can never claim he didn’t get recognized by name, though. In Ole Risom’s I am a Bunny, the main cottontail introduces himself as “Nicholas,” which is probably why Nick’s beloved aunt and uncle gave him the book for his first birthday. Some kids have all the luck.

http://www.amazon.com/Am-Bunny-Golden-Sturdy-Book/dp/0375827781

http://www.nytimes.com/2000/08/24/arts/ole-c-risom-80-publisher-of-children-s-books.html?pagewanted=1

Censored

I have a confession to make. I have a complex relationship with Maurice Sendak. It started a long time ago, but, darn it, I’m still affected by it. I’ll give you the basic gist of what happened. From the time I was little, my mom would gather up the kids and we would all walk to the public library, pulling a red wagon of books to return and pushing the stroller of anyone too small to make the trip on foot. So, the Reseda branch of the library is where my memories of choosing books according to my own interests began. However, it is also where I first learned that people have different ideas of acceptable reading material. The majority of the books I chose were greeted warmly by my mother, and I hauled or carried enough of them home to stretch my arms out forever. In fact, I only remember one time when a book got vetoed. As a kindergartner, I wanted to check out Maurice Sendak’s nearly new In The Night Kitchen but it was a no go. Apparently, some women at church had been talking about their suspicions that Mr. Sendak must be a pedophile since some of his illustrations included main character Mickey in the nude. Therefore, I wasn’t allowed to be exposed to his books. It’s weird how things change over time because the only thing I noted about the nakey pictures was that it seems like Mickey is intact. And I’m O.K. with that.
http://www.amazon.com/Night-Kitchen-Caldecott-Collection/dp/0060266686

http://www.answers.com/topic/maurice-sendak

I Speak For The Trees

Years ago, I discovered Fred Meyer, a giant everything-in-one-place store similar to Super Walmart but with less evil and awesome childcare. A few years later, the single California store in a predominantly Northwestern chain closed its doors. The mammoth building sat empty, in view of the freeway, forever while rumors swirled about its future. And then one day I came over a rise on the off-ramp and saw that the entire building had been leveled overnight. I was swept by nausea as I absorbed the magnitude of such obscene waste. Demolishing a ten year-old, up-to-code building merely because new commercial tenants (a Lowe’s built virtually in the footprint of the bulldozed warehouse) want something specific enraged me. I was angry for years. I’m still angry. I experienced a similar sucker-punch moment the first time I drove past Chico’s old Downtown Plaza Park and saw it laid bare in the name of progress, raped of all the beautiful trees allegedly so “diseased” they had to be removed for public safety but healthy enough to be replanted on the property of the developer. I happen to unexpectedly like the metropolitan feel of the new plaza, but it took me weeks to picture the gaping hole where the gazebo had been without tearing up. Dr. Seuss’ The Lorax is not subtle. I guess the narrative master wanted the message to get through loud and clear: Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It’s not.

http://www.amazon.com/Lorax-Classic-Seuss-Dr/dp/0394823370

http://www.quotationspage.com/quotes/Dr._Seuss/

Where's All My Soul Sisters?

Three months to the day before Addison was born, we learned we were getting a little sister. We crowded into the ultrasound room peering expectantly at grainy, elusive images on the monitor waiting for some confirmation. The technician asked if we had any preference, and we were divided. The boys had either been flexible or non-committal until then, but the girls, eight year-old Keilana and I, were decidedly in girl camp. Keilana so she could have a majority and me so I could give Keilana what I never had--a sister. The technician then asked if we had any guesses. Since I had dreamed Addison into being long before she came to be, we all guessed girl. And the woman with the magic wand said, “You got it!” I went straight out and bought the girliest pink shoes I could find, just to make it real, and looked forward to a little sister for my brood. But change is always a bit unnerving. As I left for the hospital on the day Addison arrived, I looked at my two earthside kids, especially Connor, tiny in the middle of a king-sized bed, and wondered how it would work out. I needn’t have worried. After some typical adjustment, Addison became what she was always meant to be: a necessary part of our family. In Ed Young’s My Mei Mei, Antonia longs for a sister until reality trumps fantasy and she’s not so sure. Thankfully, there’s a no refund, no return policy on sisters.
http://www.amazon.com/My-Mei-Ed-Young/dp/0399243399

http://www.embracingthechild.org/Bookspecialyoung.htm

Monkey Business

It’s astounding, humbling, and thought-provoking to observe monkeys in action. While watching a Jane Goodall documentary that particularly resonated with me, I was transfixed by the similarities between chimp and human behavior. There were teenaged girls cooing over babies, tiny boys posturing like big apes, and even a chilling incident where one chimp who had stayed inordinately attached to his mother dispatched a newly-arrived sibling in the middle of the night, never to be heard from again. So, if monkeys are so much like us, I guess we just lucked out in evolutionary roulette, huh? Charlton Heston’s damn, dirty ape experience notwithstanding, they got the cages and we got the keys. When I was five, my family went to the zoo where we spent time at the monkey habitat. It was very busy and the animals were subjected to waves of gawkers, but seemed utterly unfazed, until one monkey chose me out of the crowd. To my delight and the amusement of the quickly growing swarm of spectators, the chimp would mirror my every move. We danced in tandem for quite awhile, until the bystanders got restless. As I turned to leave, the chimp and I locked eyes and I felt an unbearable sadness that I could walk freely away and he never could. In Esphyr Slobodkina’s Caps For Sale, the naughty monkeys are tricked into giving up their prizes but not their freedom. Esphyr escaped Russia with her family as a girl--perhaps she knows something of being held captive.
http://www.amazon.com/Caps-Sale-Peddler-Monkeys-Business/dp/0064431436

http://www.slobodkina.com/about%20esphyr.htm

Stormy Skies

We’ve started taking Scarlett to the library. With mixed results. I have such rose-colored memories of the church that books built, it didn’t occur to me that two year-olds aren’t yet aware of the library behavior policy. It all went fine at first. We stopped at the front to get Scarlett a library card since there is no longer a minimum age requirement. She had insisted on wearing her ladybug fairy wings for the occasion, so it all seemed magical. For about five seconds. The moment we stepped in the children’s section, the darling little fairy everyone was fussing over turned into Destructo Girl with me chasing like a maniac behind. She whipped through the shelves, pulling books off as she went, expressing her naughty delight at the top of her impressive little lungs. In seconds, I gave up trying to make this a “teachable moment”--getting at her eye level, using a calm voice, explaining expectations in simple language (you know, the touchy-feely stuff our parents think is ridiculous)-- and concentrated on surviving it without being banned from the library for life. Hurricane Scarlett roared through the stacks, seemingly unstoppable, until one book caught her eye and she stopped dead in her tracks. Melissa Lagnegro’s Sealed with a Kiss, from Disney’s Step Into Reading series, is for beginning readers, not toddlers, but Scarlett doesn’t know any better. Either way, it was enough to get her to settle down and look quietly at the pictures. A welcome lull in the storm.
http://www.amazon.com/Sealed-Kiss-Step-into-Reading/dp/073642363X

http://www.jacketflap.com/persondetail.asp?person=109806

The Good Old Days

We got our first microwave in 1976, before my brother who is now in his mid-thirties was born, and the darn prehistoric thing still works. It is giant and analog, with a dial instead of a digital readout, and doesn’t do anything except cook stuff, but it has lasted for more than three decades without needing a single repair. Nothing made today lasts like that. It is one of my big gripes--planned obsolescence, the intentional shoddy and temporary manufacture of even expensive things so that they only last a few years at best before needing to be replaced in a consumer-fixated culture. We pay thousands of dollars for cars made of plastic, hundreds of dollars for phones and computers which become ancient history before we can get them activated, and most of our disposable income (and sometimes far more) to replace things we didn’t really need in the first place with more stuff than we could ever need. And the old stuff goes in the dumpster and then the landfill. It’s even an end-of-school rite of passage here in Chico. Not that my corner of the world is immune. I go into the Dollar Store, thinking I’m being thrifty, and end up leaving with fifty dollars worth of complete crap without even really knowing how it happened. In David McPhail’s Ed And Me, a little girl has a long, loving relationship with the family truck, which still starts right up even after a freezing winter. Ah, the good old days.

http://www.amazon.com/Ed-Me-David-McPhail/dp/0152448888

http://www.eduplace.com/kids/tnc/mtai/mcphail.html