The Playgrind

I have Mondays off, so I spend a lot of them with B. at the playground. We have two regulars — the little playground by the school about four blocks away, and the big playground at the park by the Mississippi, which we have to drive to. Either one is fine by B. He just wants to play outside.

Last night I finally got him to sleep by promising that when he got up he could go to the playground, and he sure remembered — he was up at six and began peppering me with playground questions as soon as he was out of the crib. I made him wait until the sun peeked out of the clouds before we packed up the wagon and walked to little playground. He chose that one himself, because he has started to see some of the same kids and even more than the sand he can push around with his bulldozer and scoop up with his digger, even more than the swings and slides, Byron’s favorite part of the playground is other kids.

“We see friends?” he asks me. And when he’s there, “will that boy play with me?”

B. will pull any other kid into his little world. Even older kids want to play with him. He’s not a ringleader, just a magnet. It’s amazing to watch him. Today he had seven kids joining him in “playing trucks.” I don’t know how two introverts got such an outgoing kid.

To a certain adult who is young at heart and/or deeply disturbed, playgrounds are probably a wonderful display of young spirits mastering new skills both physical and social. But to me, they are boring places in which time passes like a snail across a field of paste. Oh, I enjoy watching Byron play and make friends, but every five minutes drags on like an hour. Even the occasional panic when the kid briefly disappears behind some playground equipment isn’t that thrilling. I expect it’s the same for other parents. We engage in small talk, which is always about the kids and never about ourselves (we trade THEIR names and ages like people at cocktail parties say their own names and what they do for a living).

At the end of today’s play, Byron must have been as exhausted by the mingling as I was, because it was a rare time when he left willingly. When we got home, he ate some peanut butter bread, asked me to play “Day O” (his favorite song) on the guitar, and then went eagerly and early to his nap. He’s snoozing in there now, probably dreaming of a second round of playground time when he wakes up.

The Ole Ax

I used to play guitar obsessively, at least an hour a day and often more, but although I did this for years and years I never got any better after the first year. I could never pick without getting over-excited and just sending my fingers fluttering all over the strings. I have a hard time playing in any rhythm other than some private one that courses through me and comes out in every song. I painstaking learned about three “hard” songs — “Over the Hills and Far Away” was one  – but rarely made it through one without messing up.

I never had any but the slightest dreams of being a pro, anyway, and I never lined up  even the paltriest  coffee shop type gigs. I suppose with lessons I might have gotten a tad better, but maybe it was never really about that. It was just something I did because I enjoyed the feeling of playing. I liked the ringing strings and the cathartic quality of belting out a song. (I would sing, too, but I’m terrible).

I have a friend who’s a painter who said once he loves the process of painting but hates everything he’s painted (even though he’s had some success at it). That’s how I am with guitar. The difference is that everybody else hates it to, or at best tolerates it because they like me personally and find something kind of sad and beautiful about my quixotic efforts to make music.

I don’t think I quit guitar all at once. It kind of petered out. I stopped playing every day. I would get a new guitar book and after stumbling through a couple of songs, set it aside and do something else where  before I would have done nothing but play all night, and maybe forget to eat dinner. And then, as I focused more and more on my writing, I put it away for good.

YEARS went by where I would not take the guitar out even once. I would think pretty often about getting the guitar out, but never do it.

One day I listened to The Avett Brothers “Kick Drum Heart,” and I thought about how much fun it would be to play that song, and how it couldn’t be that hard. I had heard it before, but this time I went home and went into the darkest corner of the basement and found the guitar and brought it upstairs and tuned it and sorted out the chords to “Kick Drum Heart” and strummed it for a good twenty minutes while Byron tried to strum the strings and then found a harmonica to “accompany” me.

And now every day I come home and play for like fifteen minutes, which is all I can do with the kid, etc., and it’s great. I’m getting back my modest leve of skill and my calluses. I’ve missed this part of me and I’m glad to have it back.

But I’m still not that good.

Rainy Day Dadding

I will be spending tomorrow with a rambunctious toddler who mostly wants to play in “the big blue room.” If you can spend the morning at the park, the day is a piece of cake — he has fun, daddy has fun, we go home and have lunch, and then he naps and daddy… probably naps too.

But if you’re INSIDE all day, the kid bounces off the walls, gets into things, makes noise, and basically brats around because he’s bored and cooped up and crazy.

Here is the forecast:

 

Maybe I’ll read him a book about a town plagued by ceaseless rain.

 

On Track

The winter in Minneapolis dragged on two months too long, and it was hard not to feel like everything was on ice. I lapsed from all my self-improvement schemes. I didn’t write anything and left my WIP as an unrevised (if complete) first draft. Books piled up unread in various corners of the house. I didn’t even binge on Netflix or computer games. I look back and can’t say, really, what I did. I was in a late winter blah. It’s still cool and wet here, and with summer around the bend it feels really like spring never happened.

The day after Memorial Day was a momentous one. I had a long conversation with my agent about my WIP and figured I better get back to work on it with renewed gusto. I started planning some late-spring cleaning. I returned to my day job with big ideas. And I went on Weight Watchers.

I am weirdly fond of tracking things. When I write, I keep logs of word counts. When I take up running or walking, I track the miles. When I read long books, I keep checking the page I’m on against the page count. (My e-reader tells me exactly how far I am an how much more time it’ll take to finish, which I admittedly love, even though it is completely unnecessary and probably appalls a certain kind of serious reader). I count and parse and track practically everything. I would rather live naturally, like a rabbit sprinting across the lawn, with no mind for progress, only for the goal — but I’ve found that to make progress, I need to obsess on progress. It’s the only way I’ve ever finished anything.

So when it comes to weight loss schemes, Weight Watchers pushes my tracking-addict task/reward buttons. And at first it is wondrous, reckoning every point in and point earned, distancing yourself from the Funyon-devouring monster you were just a few weeks ago. Suddenly you are accountable, and it’s weirdly fun (at least at first.)

I am not quite up to connecting my WW account to Facebook and boring my acquaintances with my weekly neck measurements or whatever, but I can even see the navel-gazing glory of making it all public. That makes you even more accountable, I guess. And there is some peer support, posting that you are 78% of your former self and collecting “likes.”

I associate process with progress, but I wonder at what point it becomes a cart-before-the-horse thing. Sometimes word counts don’t tell me how close I am to my real goal, which is a quality first-draft manuscript. And when I see myself hunched over the keyboard, musing aloud that avocados (unlike most vegetables) are not a point-less “power food,” I feel a little bit like a wary skeptic listening to a newborn zealot of pop-sci religion.

In any case, I plan to lose some weight this summer. And to get to a great second draft of that manuscript. And potty train a kid. And all of us get stickers and stars for every day we inch closer to our goal.

The Great Brain Series (Part 2)

I posted recently about my love for The Great Brain books as a kid and my disappointment on re-reading them years later. I went back yet again — another fifteen years have passed since that unhappy reunion — in the hopes that they weren’t as bad as I thought. I started with Book 3 because it was my favorite, and my review is in that earlier post.

Now for the first two (The Great Brain and More Adventures of the Great Brain). First of all, in case I haven’t made it clear, none of my concerns are really for the quality of the books. They are brilliantly written and illustrated. Fitzgerald can tell a story like nobody’s business, mixes historical detail so deftly you never feel like you’re being taught a lesson, and his characterizations could be used to teach a class. And of course he is a first rate humorist, and Tom one of the great comic characters in children’s literature (he is almost as good as the First Tom in that category). There are some great stories here. I laughed, I teared up. For people with fond memories of the series, you are not mistaken. They are good.

My disappointments came from those aspects of the book that felt, to an adult, to be heavy handed — every book has a few poignant moments — and aspects of the books that don’t stand well even with the understanding that they were historical to begin with. Those moments still make me wince. Tom shaming his little brother after the death of a family friend is particularly ugly, because it serves no purpose. A funeral for a dog is well-meaning but ventures into bathos. If it’s on purpose, it’s a patronizing kind of humor out of step with the spirit of the books; if sincere, it is another wincer. As for dated, the gender roles of the turn of the century seem more than depicted for historical accuracy, but savagely endorsed by the author. Boys have to fight. Girls are meant to be pretty. Those are not paraphrases; they are explicit morals of stories in books 1 and 2.

My reaction isn’t as severe as it was fifteen years ago. It wasn’t that I couldn’t read a book then with historical prejudice, it’s just that I went back to them with such an idealized memory that I was startled to find flaws at all. Also, the story that bothered me most still hasn’t appeared — it must be in one of the later books, which I’m sure get less inspired in every way.

For the good: some very well plotted, clever stories — one has Tom saving two boys for what turns out to be mercenary reasons; his heroism is ingenious and rousing, the comic twist at the end perfect. Though a story about reforming a tomboy is most loathsome for smug chauvinism, it also has one of the series’ best turns, as Tom finds just the right book to get her interested in reading. And a darkly comic story about a boy attempting and failing in suicide (try to publish THAT for middle grade readers now) turns into a great story where Tom’s famous great brain is shown working through a real-world problem and finding a believable solution. As a “process” story, it is one I’d recommend to kids everywhere.

One of the first American kid lit bestsellers was Horatio Alger, a writer of many limitations who nevertheless touched a nerve with over a hundred  books about kids hustling for money that sold like crazy for several decades. But at some point money became kind of a taboo topic among kids — we don’t much talk about incomes and costs of things, and few books deal matter-of-factly with money. There are a few books (I think The Lemonade Wars is one, but I haven’t read it), but no banner series in American kid lit about the fundamental American dream of turning a profit. For that reason, I think The Great Brain is still a stand-out series, as American as any there ever was, and any problems I find with it are distinctly American problems. Nothing has taken its place.

A Day At The Beach

Our family spent a week at a water park at Wisconsin Dells, a mecca of family fun in the upper midwest. There are a bazillion things to do at the Dells, but we mostly stayed in the lodge and used the waterpark. Byron loved it and didn’t need to do much else.

His favorite feature in the waterpark was a fake beach with zero depth entry.  He approached the shore cautiously each day… daring not enter right away, but just watching the other people splash around. Eventually he would wade in and wait for the wolf howl sound that meant waves were coming. By the last day he was in the deep end, secured in a tube, riding the waves with mommy.

He also liked spinning Daddy in circles while he was in a tube. That was fun for Daddy too.

We are a strange people that extoll the virtues of freedom and spend our days on fake beaches, but this is also a world where a nature walk is through carpeted hotel hallways with a guide pointing out taxidermy animals, and where story time features a giant clock with animated animals and people singing about living in the rhythm of nature, encouraging children to help the planet by using microbottles of Suave body wash (no wasteful waiting to lather!) and two-in-one shampoo/conditioner while a billion gallons of chlorinated water churn nearby. We learn to live with the irony. The kid had the time of his life.

A Recollection

When I was about five years old we had a dachshund named Ginger who wasn’t fixed and was always making puppies. For one of those batches of pups we went door to door searching for a new home for them. I guess the fact that a five year old could wander  the streets in 1973 says a lot about what a different era it was, but we also lived in a friendly and quiet area where we knew most of the neighbors.

I ended up at one house about two blocks away, was directed by a sign to the back door, and there found two women having a late breakfast and chatting and excited to have a little boy and a puppy to brighten up their day. I got the feeling by the way they talked about adopting a new dog that they both lived there and shared their lives.

Can two women get married? I wondered. The idea did not seem to my child mind to be unlikely. In fact, it seemed likely — knowing how many men and women there were in the world, what were the chances that every man found a woman, every woman a man? It seemed like such long odds, like expecting every one of Ginger’s puppies to be a brown like her instead of black or white or spotted or whatever. (I didn’t know exactly how puppies were made; it was just part of puppy magic that they were all different.)

I figured on the walk home that there must be occasional wife-wife marriages and husband-husband marriages. As soon as I got home I asked my mother if sometimes married couples were two husbands or two wives. She said no. I said there was a couple nearby like that and she said I was mistaken. I argued with her a bit, knowing what I’d seen. She  sent me to my room for a nap.

Four decades later same-sex marriage has become a reality, and now it’s about to be the law in my adopted home state of Minnesota. Among the arguments against it were the case that somehow children would be confused, upset, bewildered and even threatened by wife-wife and husband-husband marriages. And I remember being a little kid and feeling the opposite. I was more upset by the sheer irrationality of every body being expected to be the same, my mother’s brute insistence that the two women who’d taken our puppy couldn’t possibly be a family.

I’m proud that Minnesota is one of the first dozen states to champion marriage equality. And for the record, if my mother was still alive, she would be proud of us, too. She was only 27 years old when I was five, and she hadn’t made up her mind about everything.

The Great Brain Series (Part 1)

 The Great Brain was a series written in the 1960s and 1970s by John D. Fitzgerald of quasi-autobiographical stories from his own childhood. The narrator is also named John D. Fitzgerald, but John is not the eponymous main character — that honor belongs to his older brother Tom, a fast-talking con artist and entrepreneur who is always has some scheme to make money. The books are collections of stand-alone stories, though narrative threads run through each book and the entire series to sort of tie them together. They take place at the turn of the last century in Utah (before Fitzgerald the author was actually born) and give readers an interesting glimpse into the era.

I cannot tell you how much I treasured these books as a child. They always made me laugh AND cry. When Tom wasn’t up to his usual shenanigans, he lent his scheming to better causes, like saving an immigrant boy from bullies or exposing crooked government agents so neighboring Native Americans can keep their land. It was brilliant of Fitzgerald to sometimes make Tom a hero before he swindles another lot of kids out of their hard earned nickels. I read these books to tatters, and when I learned the library was only missing one book — the seventh — I told the children’s librarian. She not only ordered the book for the library, she ordered an extra paperback copy for me to keep, a gesture that makes me tear up even now.

I set out to re-read the entire series in 1990s and got them all from the library. I soon faltered. The funny stories now irritated me — Tom wasn’t really smarter than other kids, just more willing to connive and cheat. He would hide behind technicalities to win bets, shamelessly take credit for victories that were shared with other kids. Maybe I knew that as a kid, but now it bugged me more, and I was annoyed with John for putting up with it and worshipping his older brother. Meanwhile, the more heroic stories felt heavy handed, sentimental and sometimes patronizing.

There are two ways that a children’s book can age badly. One is that it feels dated thirty years later, and the other is that the artifice of the author is too obvious to the adult reader. In that way, though still well-written (and brilliantly illustrated by Mercer Meyer), the books didn’t deliver the magic I remembered. I didn’t make it past the first book.

Now that almost another twenty years have passed since that experience, I went back yet again in the hopes that my mid-90s self was too grumpy and critical (which I’m sure people who’ve known me that long will second.) I started with the eighth book, a posthumous collection I’d never read. I suspect these stories were written at various times in the life of the series, considered by the author not quite up to snuff, and pulled together into a last volume by the family with some duct tape work to patch them together. And though in Fitzgerald’s polished prose, they do feel like ones he’d filed away — a couple are dull, a couple more test our willing suspension of disbelief, and one feels like a re-tread of an earlier story. I do quite like one where Tom foils a dogfighter, but overall these were previously unpublished for a reason. It wouldn’t be fair to re-appraise the series by these alone, though the conniving (even petty and vindictive) persona of Tom reminded me why I’d given up before, as well as a patronizing story where Tom helps save a Native American fellow who could have saved himself just as easily.

I decided to go to my favorite in the series, and the one I feel is the heart of the series, Me and My Little Brain. It has a lot to speak for it. First, Tom isn’t even in it — he’s away at school, and John finally gets to be the hero. Second, it is more of a novel, with an extended story about the Fitzgerald family adopting a troubled toddler who first raises hell and then becomes John’s worshipful shadow. Third, it has a lot of heart because of that relationship.

Here I found some of the magic I remembered. It has a classic middle grade arc of a main character trying and failing to be someone else, and learning who he really is. There are laugh out loud moments, sentimental ones, and a good deal more action than I remembered.  There is one troubling scene–it troubled me as a kid–and a Dickension wont to melodrama, but by the last page I was tearing up, both because of John’s courage and because I felt the pangs of nostalgia for the first time I read it thirty-plus years ago.

Two Kinds of Heaven

The spring in Minneapolis has finally sprung, and the last few days have been glorious. Yesterday I didn’t have to work, so I took B. to the big playground at the riverside park. He had a great time, and on the way across the parking lot he took both me and his mom by the hand, looked back and forth between the two of us, and said “I happy” [sic]. After a long nap we went to the smaller playground we can walk to. We set out to see diggers, knowing there was construction two blocks away, but they were gone by the time we got there. The playground was to keep him in good spirits.

Later I read a good story, “Train Dreams” by Denis Johnson.

There’s a story by Harlan Ellison about a guy getting to pick one day to relive over and over as a kind of heaven (or hell). Most people pick seismic days: weddings, etc. He picks an ordinary, decent day that is not extraordinary. I might pick this one. Nothing special, but a day I could re-live. Satisfying meals if not special ones. Sunshine and family. A tall glass of lemonade. Playgrounds and a good story.

*

As a college student I wrote a story about Heaven. It has been a topic of interest to me for some time. I don’t believe in Heaven, per se, with the gospel choirs and halos, but I like to imagine the afterlife. In my story, the hero is met by John Lennon (the only person he would follow) and led to his apartment. It turns out everyone in Heaven has to live with their litter, so he finds a pile of cigarette butts in the middle of his living room. He learns that Heaven is inspired by their happiest time on earth. It must have been inspired by the Ellison story*. Anyway, his heaven is the children’s section of the small-town public library he went to as a child, with the same domed reading chairs that looked like something out of Star Trek, and the shelves fully stocked with all the books he remembered. He opens one and starts reading.

I thought of that story just recently, because I am once again driven by urges to find the books I grew up reading. I have talked about a few of them before, but mentioning Pinkwater and Byars as influences might obscure the most important thing about my formative literary years, which is that I read everything. I wasn’t a kid who liked this-or-that kind of book; I read them all. I read the mysteries, the comic books, the heartbreakers and rib-ticklers. I read sci fi and historical and fantasy and biographies. I even read pre-teen romances, trying to hide them under biographies of baseball players so the librarian wouldn’t notice. I was a true omnivore.

Today I went to the Minneapolis Central library in search of a long-forgotten book about a pigeon lost in New York. I didn’t remember the title or author and searched for it futilely, finally finding a suggestion on WhatsThatBook.com. I saw that the library had one copy in the stacks. What are the stacks? A big, locked room of tall shelves, so close together that they are on motorized tracks. I’d been to the Central Library before but didn’t know about those stacks, which have thousands and thousands of books that are still in circulation but not on the main shelves. And there were all the books I ever read as a kid — many I’d forgotten about. I didn’t have much time so I got the one book (it was the right one) and a few others, but I will be back. I could spend a year just reading and remembering.

*If  anybody knows what this story is, please leave the title in the comments.

Alvin Fernald, An Old Friend

I often think of the friends I grew up with: Homer Price, Henry Huggins, Kerby Maxwell, Danny Dunn, Jupiter Jones, Tom Fitzgerald, and Lewis Barnavelt, among others. I’ve done a poor job staying in touch with those guys, and some of them have done a poor job staying in touch with me (i.e., in print). Oh, well. When you do go back to those old friends, it’s kind of weird, like Harlan Ellison’s classic story, “Jeffty was Five.” You have grown up and the world has changed, but these kids and their worlds are unchanged.

And so it was with trepidation that I reacquainted myself with Alvin Fernald, hero of a series of books by Clifford Hicks, mostly written in the 1960s and 1970s. Hicks was the editor of Popular Mechanics, and Alvin Fernald began his literary escapades as an inventor, but in later books he tried his hand at different things.

As a child I read all of the Alvin Fernald books. My favorite was Alvin’s Secret Code, which deals extensively with codes and ciphers. I had a sudden urge to re-read it and acquired it from A Libris. It was at the library, and available as an e-book, but there’s something magical about reading books that look like (in fact, ARE) the same as the ones you read long ago.

One of the principle characters in that book is Mr. Link, a WWII vet and code expert who helps Alvin and his friends learn to break codes just in time to break a real-life code and find a lost treasure. Mr. Link has infectious enthusiasm for cryptography and probably taught a generation of kids how to break letter substitution ciphers based on letter frequency and figuring out words based on what you know about the person. I still remember the lessons Mr. Link taught me all those years ago. I’ve decoded simple substitution ciphers plenty of times… breaking a “secret language” a girl I knew in high school used to write a message on the board, doing the cryptoquip along with the crossword puzzle in the daily paper, deciphering a postcard from 1911 that I found in an antique shop, and translating the messages in the margins of the first Artemis Fowl book.

What I forgot was that Mr. Link was an “invalid,” compelled by war injuries to stay in bed, and here is where the book  seemed dated, even for 1963 when it was released. They had wheelchairs in 1963, so there’s really no reason the guy should be house-bound. It was still fun to re-read the book, but that part had me scratching my head.

My Alvin experiment didn’t end there. The other book I most wanted to re-read was Superweasel, a 1974 book that has Alvin as a caped crusader against polluters, and might be one of the first environmentally-themed kid lit mysteries. (I wonder if Carl Hiaasen ever read it?)  Heck, it even precedes Edward Abbey’s The Monkey Wrench Gang, while featuring a similar theme of sabotage to protest environmental hazards. The problem of pollution and its solution are way over-simplified, but I’ll go ahead and call it visionary. I particularly like how Alvin’s sister Daphne emerges as a more complete character and an asset to his enterprise. I think one lesson that emerged from comparing the two books is that subversive books hold up better over time than pro-establishment books.

Lots of books have boy geniuses, but I like Alvin because he’s not overly sophisticated or precocious, like the Dilton Doilys that spout information straight from the author’s research (or worse, get it wrong). Alvin is a lousy speller and sometimes fakes his way through things with bravado more than knowledge, but he models the meta-attributes of intelligence: enterprise, drive, and curiosity. Superweasel has him applying those to an altruistic venture, and as a kid I felt like it was magical: a real life superhero, and evidence that one kid could make a difference.

In The Wacky World of Alvin Fernald, a 1981 collection of shorts that is for all practical purposes the end of the series. (There was one more issued in 1998 along with re-issues of the rest, and I’m kind of dubious of that one). It’s a mixed bag, but I like the first story where Alvin floats a lot of big ideas past his friend Shoie and his sister, and lays out his credo: what the mind can conceive, I can achieve. There are worse mottos a kid could live by.