Why I Don't Write Children's Literature (2 page)

LOSING YOUR PLACE

On the first Sunday of Lent, I arrive late to service, hat dotted with rain, my overcoat on my arm. I enter the sanctuary quietly while the congregation sings, “O Emmanuel,” the solemnity working on my soul within seconds. I know this Protestant church, and I know the members, all thirty. They are mostly adults, some infirm, others recovering from injuries, almost all without gainful employment.

One gentleman with his sweater buttons in the wrong holes grips the back of a pew and lifts himself up. He brings the Bible to his face. Instead of reading the assigned passage from Luke, he mumbles through Mark. No one interrupts until the deacon struggles to her ancient feet and, with the help of a cane, approaches him. He continues reading until she tugs his sleeve. Then he looks up, his eyes like pale-blue fish behind his eyeglasses.

“What?” his face says, confused.

The deacon whispers, “Wrong verse, Henry.”

With her help, he locates the correct page and passage. The deacon's long fingernails are pale as candle wax. He rewets his lips, stubborn as the old can be. He's going to get it right this time. Face close again to the page, he reads the correct passage. He grins at us after he finishes.

“This morning,” he says, “I read more scripture than you deserve.”

HARD-BOILED EGGS

On a bright Monday morning, I received a letter from the MacArthur Foundation, which is known for its “genius awards” and the jealousy they create, as in: “How the hell did
he
get a prize for that drivel! The dude can't even spell!” The envelope had arrived along with a few bills, some advertisements, and
Better Homes and Gardens
. I pleated my brow, wondering what the foundation could want from me, when it already had the huge dump truck that goes around unloading $250,000 to $500,000 on awardees' lawns. I would have opened the letter at once except for the hard-boiled eggs rattling for my attention. I made my way to the kitchen, spooned two eggs out of the pan, and set them in a white bowl with ice. For a creative second, this reminded me of conceptual art, the kind of arrangement that might have gotten you an
MFA
in the 1970s.

Then I returned to the letter, eager to see if it was my time. When had a foundation, large or small, ever written to me? But I can't spell either! Maybe I was at the front of the line. Outside the kitchen window, however, no laden truck cast a shadow across my lawn. And there was no guy with a clipboard at my door, asking, “You're Soto — right? Sign here.” Just two robins pulling stringy grubs from the lawn.

I opened the letter, made dutifully ragged by my excitement, and read the first paragraph. The foundation was asking if I could scout around, ninja-like, for individuals who might deserve lots of money for their creative work — music, art, poetry, fiction, etc. They had their dump truck idling not far away, the bundled twenties piled on pallets. I could write back — hush, hush, they recommended — with names. They would do the rest.

Deserving people? They were on every dirty corner, living in bushes, for Pete's sake, and sustaining themselves, like saints, on crackers. When I heard the toaster pop, I went back into the kitchen. A question mark of smoke rose from the toaster's grills. I buttered my slightly burnt toast and peered at my two Humpty Dumpty eggs, still steaming among the ice cubes. I took them from the bowl and tapped their crowns. The shells broke into shards and I peeled them, artistically. I spread my toast with jam. I rained salt and pepper on the eggs, blew on them, and made my way to the sofa. There, I picked up the first egg between thumb and index finger and bit — the center was fully cooked. I let a portion of it lay on my tongue (it was hot) before chomping a few times. I bit into my toast — O, the little crescent of a smile! I returned to the kitchen for chili flakes, for that perfect south-of-the-border experience.

I feasted on my morning meal while marveling, through my reading glasses, at the foundation's stationery — so formal, so educated, so authoritative. The signature was sort of muscular and most certainly from a fountain pen — a nice touch.
I should get stationery with my name on the top
, I thought. I sighed, remembering that I don't possess the grace of artful penmanship. I should have listened to the nuns when I was in grade school. I imagined the letter's author, properly educated, with a PhD's regalia in his closet, seated in a nice office with a Norman Rockwell on the wall.
No
, I corrected myself, not Rockwell: Frank Stella. Shelved along the walls were leather-bound books by philosophers who had lived on onions and wept over their failures. In the background, a Bose sound system played a sonata by a composer dead three centuries.

In my own office, I revisited a poem about first love. The poem was meant to stir young couples into love — or at least to make them horny. It had been in my file for more than a year and I was seeking good lines to pilfer and cobble into a new work. But then I got sidetracked by a lone cuff link I found in my desk drawer. I began a search for its mate, my hands clawing like a convict's through rubble. I ended the quest after noticing a shard of eggshell on the cuff of my sweater. It took three seconds to detach the shard and ten more seconds to conclude that the two poems, new and old, were both anemic efforts, not worth the trouble. I flipped the cuff link like a coin into the drawer.

Back in the kitchen, I re-read the MacArthur Foundation's letter. Because of its formality — and because I had a hunch that my opinion would be just one among many — I didn't bother to write back, supply names, or hint, “Hey, what about me?” The foundation, in turn, never wrote to me again. Since then, I've cracked hundreds of boiled eggs, looking out my picture window, where I can see a lake, some placid deer munching their daily rations, and a stand of trees. Anyone who lives in Berkeley would recognize this as a million-dollar view. Soon, the genius of daffodils will add even more beauty to our yard and the Japanese maple, presently denuded, will unfurl its leaves like newly printed fifty-dollar bills.

IN PRAISE OF DAYLIGHT SAVINGS

Last week I pulled from the shelf Gombrich's
A Little History of the World
and was charmed by the clear writing and the easy-to-absorb erudition. I sought out this book because I'm preparing myself for daylight savings time, when the day ends just behind a line of trees and the stars appear before I set out the soupspoons for dinner. The cat will claw and meow at the front door. If he gets no response, he will cry at the back door. The heater, rumbling below, will send warmed air upward through three ducts until it reaches me in my comfy leather chair.

Is it too late to learn more about ancient history? I'm already acquainted with Neanderthals, those lumbering foresters who kept their distance from humans. They resembled us but were hairier, had stronger jaws for chomping on bones, and were shorter and thicker in build, like running backs. They were from the valley of Neander in what is now Germany. They mated without romance and died in blizzards or from tumbling off cliffs in search of rabbits, long-horned deer, and edible roots anchored in ice-hard earth. The Neanderthals invented tools: sticks to hold rabbits over a fire, stone axes to break the snouts of onrushing bears.

I could study humankind, of course. But now, with the summery light vanquished, I'm pausing to consider nature as a subject worth knowing. I'm unfamiliar with foliage, for instance. Last summer a child held up a flower and asked, “What genus is this?” I twirled the stalk and answered, “The yellow bloom group.” I pointed to another cluster and replied, “Those are from the white-power flower group.” I led the child to the lake. With confidence I remarked that the moon is responsible for making waves pitch upwards to tremendous heights and for making men go crazy. I told this neighbor child that my beard stands up when I pull laundry from the dryer — static electricity, you know, along with the ghosts of the Industrial Revolution.

The sun wheeled, darkness spread its ash, and the winds of autumn removed strands of my hair. The day was nearly over when the child asked, “What star is that?”

“Which star?” I asked, standing near the apple tree in my yard.

The child pointed. “The one next to Polaris, just outside of Orion's belt.”

Was this boy a genius with a Band-Aid on his elbow? I bit my thumbnail, feigning deep rumination, and replied, “That there, sonny, is the Lucky Star.”

The wind picked up, taking a few more strands of my hair, the ones I considered bangs. I sighed and named this sigh
Shame
. I do not possess even a
GED
in time or in planets. Let Cassiopeia shift, roll, spin, or hurl — whatever she can do to fill the black holes of my education.

Gombrich's history fails to touch upon folklore — a pity. I wonder what our early efforts were like, chewing the fat around a Neanderthal campfire. What stories were made up to scare children, for instance? I sometimes return to the cautionary tales of my own childhood, to Chicken Little and the Big Bad Wolf. They're worth pondering, I think. It's too bad that the Three Blind Mice and the Tortoise and Hare are absent from the historian's timeline of human nature. I would have enjoyed his interpretation of Humpty Dumpty's tumble from the wall. Was the big egg nothing but an omelet that never found his way to a plate?

With daylight savings time, I may bone up on myths and folklore. Or I may narrow my interest to everyday creatures that tread on all fours, such as my cat, who is presently napping in my recliner. He thinks he's me. I have known him for 16 years but he has known me, in cat years, for 103. At least this is what I calculate from my position on the carpeted floor. I move from an easy yoga pose into a deep stretch, hand gripping the knob of my big toe. When I meow in slight pain, he opens one eye, assesses my presence, then closes that eye. Opening both eyes just to see me would be too much trouble.

In our reversed roles, he in the recliner and me on the floor, there must be another cautionary tale. Am I nothing but an older man, or do my bushy eyebrows signal the start of a new species? Or could these eyebrows represent a gene leftover from Mr. Neanderthal? I'll have to read
A Little History of the World
more thoroughly, to see if it was possible for those genes to travel over the centuries into my own polluted bloodstream. For now, I recognize my genetic history only as backdrop. In my standing yoga pose, I'm shadow and light. That's all some of us can be: shadow and light. I am a doer of no great deeds, powerless to arouse a meow from my cat. He won't even open both eyes for me.

Welcome to daylight savings time.

* * *

The day speeds across the sky, siphoning gratitude away. True, there is some sunlight, and true, we can get much done in these shortened times. That said, I pay homage to DeLoss McGraw, a friend and artist of whimsical nature and enduring charm, who is underappreciated by our nation. Why doesn't a foundation award him a prize? Why doesn't Mr. Google open a large wallet and say, “Pick out the hundreds”? I possess five of McGraw's paintings. One hangs in the hallway; I pass it every few minutes as I move around the house. It's a largish pastel of my wife Carolyn and me in our best light and maybe our best years: we're young, standing face to face, with our arms coming up to touch one another. There is a fire above Carolyn's head, the genius of love. Here is the positive nature of marriage done in bright blues, yellows, and reds. The foreground holds a house: love has found a house and will live there for many years.

We have black holes in our education and much larger holes in our gratitude. DeLoss McGraw, favorite artist, if you would allow me to open my wallet, you may pick out all the twenties.

WORDS WE DON'T KNOW

I use the public library weekly and, when I return home, stash my haul on a bookshelf. On the shelf at this moment are several histories, a gardening book, and Ian McEwan's
The Child in Time
, a novel about the abduction of a three-year-old girl and the unraveling of her parents' marriage — guilt, anger, grief, loneliness. I'm a quarter of the way through this tidy novel but may return it to the library, unfinished. Words are underlined in pencil by one of the previous readers who, I suspect, was trying to improve her vocabulary — “deciduous,” “reptilian,” “affability,” “provenance,” “slow loris,” “averse,” etc.

The underlined words have halted my progress and not because of annoyance. As a poet, invariably searching for the right words myself, I began to consider the author of these pencil strikes. I couldn't help but wonder about this previous reader — the culprit, let's say. She was female, near my age (early sixties), and reflective about the years lost on a no-good husband. Like the dainty pencil marks, she was understated in every way — touch, voice, makeup, and clothes. I began to imagine her as a reader of admirably crafted contemporary fiction (published in 1987, I still consider McEwan's novel “contemporary”). Perhaps a nurse attracted to the novel's theme — a child abducted and nowhere to be found. Or a psychologist — but no, that was wrong too. A psychologist would have known most of the underlined words, as would a nurse. Maybe an inexperienced bookworm, on her way to the morning shift by bus?

Who was she?
I assigned her the details of a life story. A widow, she read the novel late at night, with cotton balls in her ears against the noisy neighbor above, while a moth batted around the lamp and a cat the color of smoke slept at her feet. No — she was an office worker on her lunch hour in a park with graffiti-marked trees. A duck with a white ring around its neck was eyeballing her from three feet away. Did she have a crust of bread to quiet its quacking? But no, I was hasty: she was really a florist in rubber boots, her breath condensing in the cold, with a surplus of roses in tall buckets to sell by late afternoon.

Conjecture, all of it, but one fact remained: a reader had underlined words. In doing so, she had embraced the view that learning doesn't end. She might have been a mail carrier padding about in corrective shoes (this is how I saw her by page 180), but she was not about to give up on her head, now capped with grayish hair.

There are thousands of words we don't know, long or short, soft or clunky, seen in print or heard in conversation. We can just let them go, like passersby, and be none the worse because of it. But we also can give new words a try on their own. Who is this person who looks like a
dogmatic
priest? What sort of
fluctuating
shopper is she? Where did they get that
dubious
car? These adjectives may not quite fit the nouns, but the attempts are interesting. Why don't we
forge
the refrigerator? Close but not quite.

In a recent novel, I paused at this sentence: “ ‘She's fly,' said Mathew to his best friend, Ronald.”
Fly
? I mouthed the word, quietly befuddled. Was this a typo? Did the author mean to say “She's flying”? That wasn't probable because the scenes in the novel were grounded — nothing about planes, terminals, check-in, and such. Failing to grasp the meaning, I asked a young man eating lunch on a bench, who said that
fly
meant lovely or pretty or hot. Then the young man put down his sandwich and informed me that the word was like a Blackberry — no longer in use.

Oh.

I might finish McEwan's novel — it's very good, after all. But as my eyes peruse his prose, I can't help but think of the previous reader — nurse, psychologist, florist, or mail carrier — as concocting a subplot, a sleuth with a pencil poised. With
affability,
she turned the
reptilian
page and, through reading glasses thick as mine, made
aversive
checkmarks on her
dubious
self-improvement, while her cat and her stuffed
slow loris
watched with
provenance
from the end of a very comfy and
deciduous
bed.