Up the metal steps went my body, in through the narrow door and out onto the black rubber mats. The steering wheel was to the right, as usual, but to the left were rows and rows of spines. The spines went all the way to the back. The room rocked a bit as I stepped further inside. I chose one and opened it up to the thin white layers inside. I skimmed its dark lines to see if this one was for me. I loved them, all of them and this room, parked in front of my grade school. It was one of the first magic spaces in my life; it was the book mobile.
I was raised on potato-tuna casserole and “Rootie Kazootie.” Rootie hit home runs while Polka Dottie led the cheer, and then he rescued El Squeako Mouse from Poison Zanaboo. There were other children’s stories, so many, “Little Indian,” “The Little Red Hen” and “The Tale of Peter Rabbit.” I sat under my mother’s arm and braved danger after danger. Little Indian bravely stayed by his hurt horse though the dark and scary night. The little red hen baked her cake alone, outwitted the fox and shared her cake. Peter Rabbit hid under a pot to escape from Mr. McGregor. Talking animals, for many of us, were our first best friends. Perhaps our parents read these too us for their moral values, as if children’s literature exists to instruct and preach. That didn’t work. We remember a good story, a unique character, some good lines. It’s enough.
These reside in deep memory, our storybook friends and their adventures, and we don’t merely remember them, resting somewhere in the recesses of our cerebrums, snaked back to the surface throughout life by our hippocampuses, but in one way or another we eventually live them. I hit a Rootie Kazootie home run in grade school, turning on an inside fast ball and smacking a line shot that just kept rising over third, sailing over the outfielder in left, landing at the bottom of the hill and bounding into the trees. The arc of that shot, my unimpeded romp around the bases, crossing home plate and still waiting for Ronnie to find the ball – “Gosharootie,” life is good when you are the star, even if for just a moment, of Kazootieland.
Most every story that we read has universal elements with counterparts in our lives, like shadows have the thing that casts them. Take Little Indian for instance, the brave little child who loves the horse he finds. I too found a lost creature one summer day when I was little, a big red cat lying in the daisies, and I hauled him home under my arm. I can still remember his soft, flexible weight, almost dragging to the ground as I rescued his mangy hide, and made “Red” my best friend, day and scary night. And my mother hen baked me white cake with chocolate frosting on my birthdays every year, and we all ate it, whether we had helped or not. And I don’t remember helping. And we planted vegetables in a large garden spot near the house and the rabbits nibbled on them when we weren’t looking. Our early stories are the literary templates for our lives. And our later readings teach us how to write our own, Darwin borrowing phraseology from Humboldt’s personal narrative when he wrote his Beagle diary.
In writing about the value of fairy tales, G. K. Chesterton said, “My first and last philosophy, that which I believe in with unbroken certainty, I learnt in the nursery.” Chesterton tells how he learned from the fairy tales what he would later learn from philosophy and theology, that life was supernatural, mysterious and unpredictable. Ideas are powerful, and resident in tales they are even more powerful. We begin college in the nursery, encountering some of the great oppositions of life, good and evil and the will to persist in the face of dark magic until a beautiful woman or a beautiful kingdom is won.
When I think of stories I think of my mom. She read them to me. And she read them with me. When I was in grade school my mom and I read Zane Grey novels together, ones we had gotten from the bookmobile or the little library in town. We loved Riders of the Purple Sage. I totally connected to The Lone Star Ranger. “Duane could draw it [his gun] with inconceivable rapidity, and at twenty feet he could split a card pointing edgewise toward him.” I wished I could do that. I doubt if my mom did, but these stories became a bond between us. Her liking them seem to amp their value in my mind. Later in life when my wife and I went to Catalina Island to vacation we read Riders of The Purple Sage because Zane Grey had a home on the island, now the Zane Grey Pueblo Hotel.
Stories change places, turning ordinary towns into tour destinations, small houses into rooms people pay to tour. All you have to do to see what a writer can do to a town is to go to Hannibal, Missouri. Tom and Becky and Huck are now longer carefree; they’ve gone into business together. When my daughter Laurel and I went to Concord, Massachusetts we walked through the home of Louisa May Alcott. The tour paused with awe in front of a little desk in her room; it is now a relic. We wanted to touch it; maybe the magic would enter us. But it already had; we had both grown up in homes with desks and bookcases full of stories.
My mom saved a few of our early childhood stories. Their thin, fading cardboard covers moved with my family from house to house and state to state, and on a day I don’t remember now, I found some of them in a box at her house and brought them to my own home, twenty-some years after first hearing them, and I read them to my little daughters. These scraps from my childhood, a Little Golden Book, and a Better Homes and Gardens storybook, unlike my transistor radio, came alive again through my own voice and storied my own children’s childhoods. My daughters sat under my arm and heard what I heard under my mother’s arm, “The Little Red Hen” and “Peter Rabbit.”
I walked into my daughter Laurel’s room the other day and noticed that on the table by her bed were stacks and stacks of books. She is majoring in literature. The stories got to her. She wants more. When our brains are still forming, the stories we hear are archetypal, a part of deep memory, mental construction, identity formation. The other night we got to talking about children’s literature, and one of my daughters went and found our old copy of “Rootie Kazootie.” We took turns reading pages and laughing.
“’Come one step closer,’ Poison Zanzaboo cried, ‘and I’ll soak El Squeako in the lake!’”
“’Whatever can we do?’” cried Polka Dottie.”
It’s enough to make a modern egalitarian boil, the helpless cheerleader and her Mexican mascot mouse who they keep in the dugout for luck. I opened to the back of the title page, “Copyright 1954 by Steve Carlin.” I’d like to have known Steve, had him to dinner. He made up words. he must have been a fun guy.
We laughed at the Dogerooties and the Yankapups and shouted, “Zingarootie.” I checked on the chicken, broiling in the oven. The barbeque sauce on top was getting a tasty shade of dark. My daughter got out the serving dishes. The Little Red Hen was again about to share again.
Stories have a power that goes beyond their physical existence and beyond even the ideas expressed in them. Stories are community, and sharing our tales is one way we love each other. As my girls grew up I read to them out loud all seven volumes in The Chronicles of Narnia. When they were barely old enough to understand, we read out loud Treasure Island. We exulted together in The Wind In the Willows, driving furiously with Toad, journeying with Mole and Rat. For hours on end they sat on my lap or under my arm, reveling in story, in language and most of all in having an arm around a shoulder, a hand on a forearm, a leg touching the border of another leg. Touch and story are a perfect compound.
Sometimes I didn’t read stories at all; I told them stories. They have always loved to hear the stories from how I grew up, like the time I shot my brother. In telling them, I try to stick to reality, but it’s hard. The stories tend to get away from me.
They like the one about the clubbing. This one involved a clubbing game that my brothers and I invented when we were young. We would fill our socks with other socks until they were hard and bloated. Then we would separate, hide and hunt each other. Our improvised games were often about maiming or killing each other. The intent of the sock game was to bludgeoning each other into oblivion. On one memorable occasion, I crouched down beside the washing machine in wait for my brother Steve. I put my right hand back over my shoulder, club ready. I would strike, as quickly as the Lone Star ranger could shoot. The pocket door from the kitchen slid open. I could see the light change on the floor. With one fluid, non-stop motion I rose from the floor and swung the club down on his head with a vengeance. Except it wasn’t Steve; it was grandma. She swayed, staggered back, gasped and collapsed on the linoleum in a defeated heap.
It was shortly after that, that she moved back to California. It probably didn’t matter to her that her beating was intended for my brother Steve. She went home anyway. I was distraught. She had bought us a TV. More good was sure to come from her living with us. Perhaps the clubbing was the last straw. But maybe it was just time.
The girls love this story; so do I. I’m the hero. But it is the girl’s birth narratives that are perhaps the most popular in our family. When I tell Rosalind’s I say, “I cried when you were born. You were so beautiful. I loved you so much.” She is beautiful, the bluest eyes, the most lovely skin color. We played a call and response game throughout her childhood. “When will I stop loving you?” I’d ask. “You’ll never stop loving me,” she’d respond. That mattered when we were told that she was brain damaged, when we realized she would never read beyond the second or third grade level. When my wife or I tell Laurel’s story, we say, “When you was born, you were ten pounds and fourteen ounces. You were big because you were late, almost half-grown, practically ready to go to school and you didn’t want to come out. They had to suck you out with a vacuum. You looked like a cone head for weeks.” Other stories involve their very early years. The girls were both bald for a year or so and they had fat cheeks. I tell them, “We paid extra for your cheeks. And we rubbed vitamins on your heads to try to get your hair to grow.” Sometimes they have asked, “Did you really?” Such simple narratives are our histories, our oral traditions; we all need them. We want our mythic tales. We want to have a story about ourselves.
I know adults who don’t know who their parents were; they don’t know any birth stories about themselves. They live without a personal myth. One of them has an attachment disorder, another a relational disorder; they are screwed up. Stories matter.When we don’t have early childhood stories we grow sick. When my girls were very little I made up stories for them. I’d begin, “Once upon a time there was a piece of dirt. He felt so sad because he didn’t think that he was worth anything. Then one day a little girl came with a seed.” The dirt, or bug or plant always ended up finding their place in the world, making a contribution. I also told the girls stories about animals, who did what the girls would like to do, fly, eat, adventure. The most famous stories I told were the Rusty Jake Stories, renown throughout my clan. Rusty was my brother Steve’s dog, but when my brother wasn’t home, Rusty took my brother’s motor cycle for a ride, with the family house cat on the back, and they went to Washington. They were stopped by the police, but had to be let go, because their were no laws on the books about dogs riding motorcycles, and they saved the President of the United States and came back home to cheers and a parade.
Stories make choices for us. In grade school Rosalind picked a poem by Robert Louis Stevenson, our good family friend, when she was asked to choose something to memorize for a class assignment. She heard the whole of Treasure Island very young, in the first or second grade, and she invited the author back.
When I was down beside the sea
a wooden spade they gave to me
to dig the sandy shore.
My holes were empty like a cup.
In every hole the sea came up,
till it could come no more.
Rosalind grew up at the beach in San Diego. On one of her early trips to the beach she ate sand, hand over hand. We never knew why she did that, but it came out in he diaper and we were amazed — we have a sand eating baby. So when she chose this poem, she could taste it, and she could smell the salty air and she had seen the sea wash away her sand castles. She had already lived her story poem. Why do we read what we read? Perhaps we move toward the stories we have lived or almost lived or hope to live someday.
For my family, and for all of us, stories come to us in so many different packages. They are so much a part of our lives, and of course, they aren’t always in books. One of the most powerful first stories I bonded with my daughter Rosalind over was The Little Mermaid, a movie. It was the movie that saved Disney and it added to us too. We came home from seeing it cheering, singing the songs, “Kiss the Girl,” and “Under the Sea.” Disney had rediscovered it, the formula, the songs, the dialogue and more great stories were to come. We were taken up, as a family, with Beauty and the Beast, The Lion King, Hercules.
Hercules was a standout for us, the characters, Hades, Pain and Panic, the clever dialogue. We use it around the house. The characters became a part of our family. The movie is about Hercules searching for his own story, what happened to him when he was little, the reason he is different, the identity of his father, Zeus. It is one of those universal stories, zero to hero, and the more important discovery of his family and his own true love, Meg.
We loved Meg, “I’m a big tough girl, I can tie my own sandals and everything.”
“Thanks for everything, Herc. It’s been a real slice.”
Pain and Panic gave us one of our most repeatable family mantras, “If? If is good.”
Hades was sheer genius, “So is this an audience or a mosaic?”
We live by our movie lines; they have become part of the family ideolect, a homey parlance to joke with. People do this, quote lines from movies to talk to each other. The dialogue comes off the page and works in the real world. People quote from What About Bob, from Napoleon Dynamite, from everything. The stories in this way get integrated into our lives. They become part of our mythology, the shared narratives that we use to understand life.
On the movie screen, on the TV, on the computer screen — it doesn’t so much matter how the stories are delivered, but it matters how they are told. A good narrative is a good narrative and nothing will substitute. I read a lot now online, on my phone too, a news story, an article, Facebook, Twitter, checking my blog. I love a story song, something unexpected. niche, heard on Pandora Radio for the first time. I love a good sound bite, a pithy Tweet, but I think that most of all, I still love a good book. There will always be something about the page, about the longer read, about the physical experience of books, especially the books we keep. My battered copy of Shakespeare’s complete works, the checked and underlined passages on the smooth, thin pages, those favorite lines I find my way back to, “Nothing will come of nothing,” but something will come from a good story, like Macbeth or As You Like It, which is one of the sources for my daughter Rosalind’s name. And there is my old hardback copy of Emily Dickinson’s poems, the numbers of my favorites written in the front of the book so I can find my way again to those explosive bits of insight that blow the top of my brain off every time I read them. “Tell the truth but tell it slant…” I like the pencil check beside this line in my book.
Books are so physical. There textures and their smells compliment so nicely their ideas and concepts. After we reread “Rootie Kazootie” the other night, I smelled it, the pages. Matija Strlic, a chemist at University College London, has figured out that the smell of the paper in old books comes from hundreds of volatile organic compounds released into the air from the pages. From her research, she writes of discovering in old paper “a combination of grassy notes with a tang of acids and a hint of vanilla over an underlying mustiness.”
Reading is a total sensory experience, the grassy, tangy, musty pages, the spines, covers, dust jackets, paper pages signal us through our fingers. Many of the books on the book mobile, as was common with library books then, were bound into heavy, fabric bindings, dark red, blue, green, brown, and hardened with glue. The authors, titles and call numbers were printed or embossed onto the spines. I can still remember the heft of them, the rough feel of their covers in my hands.
And stories are relational and meant to be handed to other people and shared in close quarters. How often have my wife and I called out in the evening after reading alone, and laughing, “Hey, listen to this.” I still find stories as a way to find my people and bond with them. I love a reading groups where we eat together before we talk books and then we gather in the living room and puzzle over print and story and concept and quote lines and laugh and remember and travel together to a world of ideas and foreign places and togetherness. A story in another person’s mouth is a new story. I’m always surprised by what someone else sees that I don’t. We read The Elephant Whisperer by Lawrence Anthony and discussed it in a group recently. I commented that I thought Lawrence was a masterful leader shown in how he immediately addressed problems. My friend Melissa pointed out that she was more impressed by his subtle leadership, the way he let others learn for themselves and take leadership for themselves.
Our lives are journies to find good stories and to explain those stories to each other, to find something to pass on to the little ones sitting under our arms, to get back on the book mobile, the idea mobile, to take a cerebral ride, to bring friends along, to have something to tell while we eat. So has it been for all of us, or if it has not, then I wish that it may be so in the future.
Life is story and story life and there is so much more to tell.
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Thrive! 