"Without One Star For Company"

In the morning when the sun
Is shining down on everyone
How strange to see a daytime moon
Floating like a pale balloon
Over house and barn and tree
Without one star for company.

~Dorothy Aldis

I love this poem. In fact, I loved it so much I set it to music when the sweet girl was a baby. I still have lovely memories of holding my chubby infant on my lap and crooning out the words; then later, when she reached toddler/preschool age, seeing her light up when I would sing it and hearing her begin to sing it too.

I still love this poem, but today it cracked me up. Or to be more precise, the sweet girl cracked me up. If I needed any more persuading that my seven year old has arrived firmly at the "grammar" stage of learning (the delight in facts stage, the "reality testing" stage) I need it no more.

When we left for camp this morning, the sky was a bright, vivid blue spread like a smooth canopy over the river valley. Not a cloud to be seen everywhere, but one pale white balloon of a waning gibbous moon right overhead as we walked.

"Look, Mommy, a day-time moon!" the sweet girl exclaimed, which is always cause for me to launch into the song. Which I did.

And my little girl paused thoughtfully. "I wonder why you can't see other stars in the day-time like you sometimes can the moon," she mused (sending my poetry mind reeling in the direction of Wendell Berry's "day-blind stars").

Then she added, "and why does she say 'without one star for company'? The sun IS a star, so the moon does have a star for company!"

Hmm. Good point. I suggested that perhaps the poet meant no other stars, but that the line worked best for the poem here. But my "just the facts" girl said "yes, but maybe she just didn't KNOW the sun was a star."

Of course the last time we read Eric Carle's The Hungry Caterpillar, that pillar of her toddler imagination, it also drove her buggy (pun intended) that Carle said cocoon instead of chrysalis.

Welcome to grammar land!

Here, There and Everywhere There Be Dragons

I discovered the other day that when you post a status update to Facebook about something you're considering writing, you might be surprised by how much feedback you get.

I posted this little musing: that I was pondering (just pondering, mind you!) a re-telling of St. George and the Dragon for beginning readers. To put it mildly, I was amazed by the enthusiasm this musing generated. How wonderful to hear those words of encouragement. It makes me think I really ought to try it!

The difficulty I'm facing right now is finding the time to dive into any more new projects. I've started several in July, what is meant to be my serious writing month (meaning the only month where the sweet girl is in camp enough to give me some real daylight hours in which to work). I'm posting a number of reviews at Eps because we need the income, but I'm also working on several longer-term projects: two essays, one potentially longer non-fiction book, and some fiction.

The St. George idea sort of winged me out of nowhere the other day. I've had dragons on the brain, as you can probably tell from my recent posting on re-reading (in which I contemplated some of the differences in Tolkien and Rowling's treatment of dragons). The sweet girl and I are in the midst of a read-aloud of The Silver Chair, where Eustace Scrub (former dragon!) has yet another starring role. I've been working on a story (with a contemporary setting) that combines some elements of Sleeping Beauty and St. George and the Dragon (both princes-fighting-dragon stories). And I've been thinking about the particular gifts of really good writers for beginning-intermediate readers like the sweet girl.

Thinking about St. George led me to Margaret Hodges and Trina Schart Hyman's gorgeous, oh so gorgeous, picture book version. It's a Caldecott Medal winner, just stunning.

But I know that's only one take on the legend of George, merrie saint of England. I'm particularly interested right now in different versions of the legend, and in what visual images and colors recur most often through the different re-tellings. I went to the Baldwin Online Children's Literature project, my favorite repository of old stories and legends, and searched on "St. George" within the site. LOTS of versions popped up, and I've only had time so far to read a couple.

At any rate, I do seem to be finding dragons everywhere I turn. A friend wrote me today (yes, via FB) to say she'd recently purchased a small stuffed dragon to keep beside her while she works on the fantasy book she's writing. And I just finished Regina Doman's dark and thrilling contemporary Gothic fairy-tale Black as Night in which the New York subway system was wonderfully described as a fire-breathing dragon (and a terrific fight scene takes place near the third rail underground).

So if anyone wants to share any more good dragon stories or illustrations, St. George or otherwise, let me know!

Notable and Quotable

"The most important reason we need the church may be to remind us of our need to find communion with Someone with whom we have nothing in common, Someone who loves us and receives us despite our difference and inadequacy. The old idea of parish churches, where everyone attended the church closet to home, meant a variety of people were blended together into a community of unlikes. In The Screwtape Letters the tempter Screwtape advises Wormwood to attack the use of local parishes as a structure because 'being a unity of place and not of likings, it brings people of different classes and psychology together in the kind of unity the Enemy (God) desires.'"

~Peter J. Schakel, "Is Your Lord Large Enough? How C.S. Lewis Expands Our View of God"

The Joys of Re-Reading

One of the many blessings of discovering kindred spirits in online reading communities is the realization that I am not alone as a re-reader.

I have always loved re-reading books. As a child, the books I loved most were books I went back to again and again. It surprised me when I discovered that not everybody did this, and I went through a period of time when I thought perhaps I was just weird or perhaps not as smart as people who could get everything they needed or wanted from a book the first time through and go on to other things.

Gradually I began to realize that I wasn't re-reading because I forgot "things that happened" in a story (though sometimes I did, and part of the joy was rediscovering events or lines I'd forgotten!) but for the sheer pleasure of revisiting a world I'd loved the first time through. We would never say "oh, I've been to grandma's house once, so I never need to go again." Every trip is different and new, even though elements of such visits are comfortingly familiar.

I use grandma's house as an analogy partly because it was my own paternal grandmother, who came to live with us when I was nine, who presented me with one of my first pictures of an adult re-reader. My parents, who loved books and made sure our house was full of them, were rather busy in that season of my life, busy raising four of us children, taking care of my invalid grandmother, and working hard at their various jobs and household tasks. They both read, but mostly late at night or in the cracks and crevices of their busy lives.

(Side note: I still recall marveling that my mom could fall asleep over a book, something I almost never used to do -- until the past few years. Middle age has not deprived me of my love of reading, but it has ensured there are times when I simply cannot keep my eyes open and end up with my face pillowed on a paperback.)

But my grandmother, who was confined to bed for large portions of the five years she lived with us, seemed to read constantly. And I was intrigued that she went back to her favorites again and again. Suddenly I didn't feel so strange about reading Little Women for the third or fourth time, because there was Mamaw cracking open the red covers of Jane Eyre again.

I've been reading C.S. Lewis' An Experiment in Criticism for the first time, and it's such a delight to hear Lewis talk about the joys of re-reading. He hails literary readers as "deep" readers, who often want or need to go back to the same book again and again. He seems to feel that a good book is a book that can and should be revisited often. All of this gels wonderfully with the thoughts of John Granger, whose reflections on the Harry Potter stories I've enjoyed now for several years. In his new book, Harry Potter's Bookshelf (due to be released tomorrow!) John talks about the "slow mining" one can do in the great books, books that have been written with more than one level of meaning and that provide rich treasures for those who are willing to keep going back to dig.

I don't often consciously choose what to re-read when, but more often than not, I find myself busy with a re-read at the same time I'm reading other books for the first time. Certain authors seem to pull me back into their worlds at regular intervals, and even sometimes in regular seasons (Austen is almost always an autumn/winter re-read for me.)

At the moment I'm re-reading J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit and absolutely loving it. Although I typically re-read Tolkien's Lord of the Rings every 5-7 years, it had been quite a while since I'd done a full read-through of The Hobbit. I'm guessing it's been at least a decade (I know the last time was before the sweet girl was born, at any rate, so over 7 years). I'm about fifty pages from the end now, with the Battle of the Five Armies on the horizon, and while certain images and scenes have definitely come back to me, I'd also forgotten many things. It's been wonderful to re-read for the sake of the story itself, but also eye-opening to think of it as a "prelude" to LOTR (so many foreshadowings and set-ups!) and even to read it with my recent re-read of the Harry Potter series in mind.

I'm still not sure where I fall on the spectrum of thoughts about Tolkien's influence on Rowling (how direct or conscious such influence was) but it's been interesting to note certain similarities. One realization I had was how much Rowling pulls on and yet also subverts, in her usual fascinating way, the story tradition of dragons. Tolkien's Smaug is such a nasty, greedy brute, hoarding every bit of plundered treasure so that he knows down to the last ounce exactly what he's sleeping on, even though he never puts any of it to use except to encrust himself in diamond armor.

It makes perfect story-telling sense for Rowling to have dragons guarding the treasures in the vaults at the deepest levels of Gringotts, the wizarding bank, but the plight of those dragons seems so sad as they're not free (not even free to be greedy and nasty as in stories of old!) and the treasures they are guarding are not their own. By the time we get to Deathly Hallows, we've been long set up to feel sympathy for dragons through Hagrid's care for a baby dragon (and his love for all wild things) and even Harry's grudging admiration for the Hungarian Horntail. The dragon the trio meets in Deathly Hallows is a sad portrait of a proud creature now broken and in chains, trained like a beaten dog to guard someone else's hoard. It makes the whole escape from Gringotts in DH yet another yet moment when Harry, acting on intuition and his own love-shaped character, frees an oppressed fellow-creature. I know it's not his main purpose (he needs to find an escape route, after all!) but it's a happy by-product of his actions, and one that he never seems to regret. As much as JKR writes about Harry's "saving people thing" it's his "freeing people/creatures thing" that feels almost as interesting, whether it's making glass walls disappear at the zoo so the boa constrictor can slither away or making sure Mr. Malfoy hands Dobby a sock. And oh, the fruit of Dobby's freedom...

I did happen to notice that the bit of treasure that Bilbo first sneaks from Smaug's mountain of treasure (the missing bit that enrages the dragon once he wakes up and realizes he's been robbed) was a two-handled cup. It reminded me forcefully of Helga Hufflepuff's cup, the horcrux Harry, Ron and Hermione manage to get from Gringotts and then flee with on the back of the dragon. This time around, the enraged creature is not the dragon (who could care less about the treasures he's guarding for wizards and goblins and only wants his freedom) but red-eyed almost totally inhuman Voldemort. No wonder Voldemort has such an affinity for snakes and basilisks. He's got a greedy, hoarding dragon heart.

Literary Parents

I'm having "one of those weeks" where I figure I may as well clean house. When you know in advance that a week is going to be filled with stressful things you can't control (like your loss of health insurance or your kid's difficult morning at the dentist) it helps to dive into a simple, practical project where you can see satisfying results almost right away. At least it helps me! (I'm reminded of the fact that I used to love...weirdly, many people thought...shelf-reading books at the library. But what could be more satisfying than seeing that things are put in their proper places, the places where people can really find what they're looking for?)

I spent much of the morning (following the sweet girl's brave survival at the dentist...first novacaine, first laughing gas) cleaning out my laundry area. The sweet girl lay on the couch nursing her sore mouth with a milkshake and the solace of Charlie and Lola episodes and I cleaned. And I do mean cleaned. Our laundry area is essentially a hallway that functions as a sort of attic. We throw stuff there whenever we can't find room for it somewhere else, and it had been months since I'd done a good digging out. There were the piles of clothes that need to be hand washed and the ones that need sorting for give away or mending. Bags with miscellaneous craft supplies and stuff from one of the last cleaning out of the small junk drawers and a box filled with S's outgrown shoes. Plastic bottles and paper towel rolls we'd saved for D's puppet making ventures. And so on...

As I sorted, tossed, dusted, scrubbed and started loads of laundry, I remembered an idea I had once for sprucing up my laundry room. It seems to be a place where I spend a lot of time doing the routine kinds of drudgery that aren't much fun and yet are necessary if the house is to keep running. So despite the fact that I sometimes begrudge how much time I spend washing, folding and sorting, I know deep down that it's a labor of love.

So here's the idea I had: to create a montage of some of my favorite pictures of literary moms and dads that I can put up on the wall. So many of the wonderful children's books I read have terrific parental characters. They're not usually central to the story, but they're there, nonetheless, often working busily and cheerfully to make home a good place for their kids to grow.

I thought I would copy a picture of Ma Ingalls (from the Garth Williams illustrations in the Little House book) washing clothes or cooking or one of the many other chores we usually see her doing. I also want to copy a Vera Neville illustration from one of the high school Betsy books, the one of her papa, Bob Ray, wearing an apron and making onion sandwiches for the family's traditional Sunday night lunch. A picture of Sal's mother, in Blueberries for Sal, either collecting berries or canning.

Those are the ones I've thought of so far. I know there are lots more I'm not thinking of right away. Can you think of beloved or iconic illustrations, from picture books or longer books, of creative literary parents who loved their kids? My laundry room awaits your ideas!

Got Books?

I've got about a thousand more priority projects I should be working on right now, but I keep going back to ideas for a potential course proposal I'm working on about the work of C.S. Lewis and J.K. Rowling. I think it's because I've been reading a lot of Lewis and Rowling again (and also MacDonald and some Tolkien).

One problem I keep coming up against: finding books I'd really like to read that are not in our county's main library system (one of the best in the country) or in the seminary library (which has a very good Inklings section). Given my complete lack of budget for books right now...no joke, I had to use my last book review income for bills and still have no idea how I'm financing the rest of the books we need for homeschool this fall...I really can't go out on a limb and purchase these right now, no matter how I might try to justify it. I'm trying ILL, but sometimes that can take months.

It dawns on me, however, that many folks who read my blog tend to love Rowling and the Inklings (hmmm....what a coincidence)! So I thought I'd throw out the titles of two books I'm looking for in hopes that some of you out there might have copies you'd be willing to part with for a few weeks, perhaps in trade for some of the other terrific books I have on my shelves. A geeky book exchange! Sounds exciting, doesn't it? Sort of harkens me back to my tween and early teen summer days when I would swap baseball cards with Wade and Woody, two guys who lived down the street from me.

So nobody gets my 56' Yogi Berra or my signed Brooks Robinson, but here are the books I'm looking for:

The Company They Keep: C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien as Writers in Community by Diana Pavlac Glyer (Kent State University Press, 2008)

George MacDonald: Literary Heritage and Heirs, edited by Roderick McGillis (Zossima Press, 2008)

Got books? If you have these and are willing to trade for a few weeks, let me know. I've got a parcel of interesting things on my shelves, ranging from Anglican theology to Christian education to good fiction to literary criticism. If I don't need it to teach with this fall, maybe we can work out a creative exchange!

The Seventh Birthday

The sweet girl's birthday is becoming my "new way" to realize we're half-way through another year -- it used to be the approach of July 4th!

We had a lovely celebration on Saturday. After seven years, I am at last getting the hang of what makes a birthday celebration "just right" for my daughter. It has to do with simplicity and tradition: friends, ice cream, balloons, and of course muffins (no cake!) She loves the tradition I started last year, where we bring out her "birthday book," a scrapbook of pictures from previous birthdays. I didn't finish putting in all the 6 year old pictures until the morning of her 7th, but no matter. It was there to flip through and look at and marvel over, and that's what mattered.

Although we were missing some folks very dear to us this year, we still had a lovely day. And our precious little one really is seven...truly growing up, in all sorts of wonderful ways, right before our eyes. Thank you, Lord, for all your blessings on this family.

"Why It Is Important to Edit" OR Just One Little Sound

So I just posted a review of a picture book. As I re-read my zippy little conclusion, I realized I had just written this:

"a fun picture book for all households who have ever had young picky eaters of kids with big imaginations"

I don't know about you, but I doubt picky eaters would find kids with big imaginations all that tasty!

I hastily changed "of" to "OR" and practically dissolved into giggles. Now I find myself humming Hap Palmer's wonderful song "One Little Sound."

Take the /r/ from rice, and the food is cold as ice
Take the /h/ from heat, warm it up and we can eat
Take the /t/ from tape and feed a hungry ape
Oh, what a difference, just one little sound

A great song: it not only works to teach phonics, but to remind writers of the importance of careful editing!