Swimsuit season is upon us and as a mother I am constantly working to refine my explanation of modesty, without having to resort to the cover-every-situation rules of the school dress code.  Here’s this year’s version:  modesty is like sitting at a table with a bunch of people and having a pack of gum.  Don’t be bringing that stuff out if you don’t intend to share.

Today was a beautiful day, so when I went to the nearby grocery store to pick up a sandwich on my lunch hour, I decided to just eat in my car with the windows open.  The sidewalk outside the store was covered with pots of brightly colored flowers for sale and there was lovely music playing.  It was very peaceful.

As I sat there I thought—how curious that they should be piping this beautiful music outside.  It certainly went with the sunshine and the flowers, but it just didn’t seem like the sort of thing a supermarket would do.  How nice.  How surprising. 

It was only when I was began driving away that I saw the young woman playing harp outside the store.  A harp at the grocery store!  Too bad I had to go back to work.  I wished I could listen more.  And then I thought about Joshua Bell in the subway.  And I thought about time.  And I parked the car and got out to tell her how much I’d enjoyed listening. 

It was good to stop.  Good to make myself stop.  It really didn’t take very long, and we all need to say thank you when we can.

An ugly mug is a missed opportunity.

I can drink my morning coffee from a paper to-go cup if necessity dictates, but to really get the day off to a good start, I need a satisfying aesthetic experience.  That’s why I’m very careful about my morning mug.

A good morning mug is such a complete pleasure.  The colors are interesting and attractive.  The mug has just enough heft to give you comfort as you move from sleep to waking.  It fits into your hand, whether you wrap you fingers around the handle or slide your fingers through the opening and around the cup.  The mug and the handle convey warmth, but are not hot.  The lip of the cup is smooth and substantial and pleasing when you bring it to your mouth.

But look in the thrift stores, or in the cabinets of the breakroom at work:  So much ugliness.  So much waste.  So many stupid cartoons and bad flower paintings; so many souvenirs people want to forget; so many annoying promotional mugs—slapped with a logo like a china T-shirt.  Mugs that lack wit or creativity or even the tiniest bit of thought in their making.  Too many mugs that will never really be mugs but only pencil holders at best.

Why bring something into the world to be ignored and discarded—barely even useful?  Better to stick with a paper cup than betray a medium that holds such promise.

There are some questions in life that you can’t answer to everyone’s satisfaction, but you should answer to your own.  It took me well into adulthood to find my answer to “If a tree falls in the forest and there’s no one there to hear it, does it make a sound?”   Here it is:  “If I go into the bathroom and turn on the fan, has the baby stopped crying?”

 Sometimes, despite my worst fears or greatest desires, it’s just not about me.

Spidey, Spidey, Spidey! These days I can’t walk into my friendly neighborhood discount store for fear of being webbed. You know what I mean. You’ve felt it too. The snack foods, the bed sheets–how many tie-ins can there be in one capitalist society?!? Ahhhh. Let’s think about it for a minute.

Ok, that’s enough. Actually, there are only a couple of items that seem worthy of comment:

First-the Spider Spud. It wasn’t enough for Mr. Potato Head to be packing a pair of angry eyes in his seat pajamas–now he’s got a superhero costume too. (And if you look a little further on the web or in the toy department you’ll find out that he’s got Darth Tater, Spud Trooper and Artoo Potatoo costumes tucked in there too!) What turns a tater to spandex?

But if Spider Spud made me do a double-take, the one that really made me go “Whoa” was the Spi-Dog MP3 companion.

Talk about your angry eyes! This is one fierce-looking pup dancing on your desk. More importantly, it raises the larger issue: Is it morally wrong to dress your dog in a costume?

I ask you, is this a happy dog?

I worry sometimes that our expectations of life are leaning too much towards convenience. We like our grapes seedless and our chicken off the bone. We want every poem to be comprehensible on first reading; every new software application to be instantly useful; every human relationship to be effortless. We put up with a lot of mediocrity for the sake of ease, and we will walk away from the meaningful, the beautiful, the interesting, the important if it looks like it might be too much work.

Maybe we overvalue our own time and effort. Maybe we undervalue the things of this world. I don’t know. All I know is sometimes you have to gnaw the meat off the bone, or eat the fruit and spit out the seeds. Sometimes you might even find yourself picking crab.

As a storytime person I am always looking at picture books and trying to pair them with other titles to make an interesting program.  It’s sort of like arranging several dinner parties every week.  What flavors will work well together?  What’s in season?  What juxtaposition will stimulate good conversation?

Now, I am well aware that some of my ideas will never fly.  They’re just a little too wacked.  And I can deal with this, but if I could…

I’ve got some great stories for a Political and Economic Issues storytime.  We’d start with one of my all-time favorites—

Farmer Duck, by Martin Waddell and Helen Oxenbury where the Workers of the World (well, ok, the Animals of the Farm) unite to overthrow the lazy old farmer and take over the means of production.

Then we’d move on to Doreen Cronin’s Click, Clack, Moo:  Cows that Type where the cows and chickens learn the power of collective bargaining and strike for better working conditions.

After singing a stirring American Labor tune (Woody Guthrie?  no—it should be “Maggie’s Farm”), we’d finish up with the classic picture book  A Bargain for Frances by Russell Hoban,  in which a young badger learns “caveat emptor” and we explore issues of trust, betrayal, and friendship in business (Perhaps this would also be a good candidate for a Faculty Academy Keynote storytime?).

There’s a lot to talk about when you pick up a really good picture book.  Maybe if I change the title of this storytime, I can still pull it off.  Now, if I can just come up with an appropriate fingerplay….

“This little pig went to market…”

This was my very first library.  When I was small, my mother would walk with me down tree-lined streets to this building (built on a 40′ x 60′ lot and designed to hold 6,000 volumes).  There I would sit on the floor in front of the picture books and be as happy as any child ever was.  I got my first library card here–a great milestone of maturity then because you had to be old enough to write your first AND last names.  (I practiced at home beforehand to be sure I would get it right.)

I still remember where things were shelved in my childhood library.  The picture books were under the big window to your left just inside the front door.  I knew exactly where to find my favorites, though it was a source of great frustration to me that Mr. Willowby’s Christmas Tree was placed in storage after the Christmas season was over.  (I would have to wait months before it reappeared–just like I waited for the Wizard of Oz to come on television every December.)

 Later I moved on to the chapter books–the first books I knew by author’s name not artist’s style–which were on the left wall of this tiny space.  There I could find books by Laura Lee Hope, and a collection of Disney stories with a green cover, and the D’Aulaire’s biography of Christopher Columbus with the picture of him holding an orange and pondering the shape of the world.  

We moved to suburbia after third grade, so I never got to explore beyond that front left quadrant of the Hardy County Public Library.  I’ve discovered some favorite spaces at other libraries since then, but none of them were as magical as the spot beneath the picture window with treasures before me and freedom to choose.

If you’ve looked at greeting cards or gone shopping anytime in the past five years, then surely you are familiar with the secularization of Christmas (Happy Holidays!) and Easter (Happy Spring!).  I figure this is one way for the greeting card industry to expand the number of people I can actually send cards to at various times of the year—especially now that e-cards have arrived and I’m buying fewer cards than I once did.  They have to work to maintain revenue.

But the other day I was looking for a “Religious Easter Greeting” and was surprised to find that they were now being written by the same group of generic well-wishers.   You don’t have to be particularly steeped in Christian tradition to know that a religious Easter card should say “He is Risen!” or at least contain the words “resurrection” or “empty tomb” somewhere in the body of the greeting.  Victory, joy and love are also appropriate, but it’s that Easter morning surprise that’s crucial to the celebration.   All I could find were sentiments like “God bless you with a happy spring!”  and “May you see God’s love in the beauty of the earth.”  Granted these do contain the word “God” and could be constued as religious; however, they are not “Religious Easter Greetings.”  In fact they’re not particularly creative greeting cards of any sort.  No matter how pretty the picture. 

As part of some recent library training I sat in on storytime at the downtown library.  It’s an older building where they still use a 16mm film projector to show Weston Woods movies. (Does anyone else remember these from Captain Kangaroo?  Stone Soup and Georgie?   These stories are some of my most vivid memories of the show–right up there with Mr. Moose and Bunny Rabbit.)

Anyway, we were near the end of storytime and were watching the movie, Changes Changes–six minutes or so of terrific wordless storytelling over music.  As the film began, all the children were instantly face forward, eyes glued to the screen-except for one tagalong sibling, about one and a half years old, I’d guess, who was fascinated by the movie projector.  At first I thought it was mildly interesting that she was looking at the projector and not the image, but I really took notice when it happened again in the next storytime with another child.

I grew up with the sound of 16 mm projectors in school classrooms and church fellowship halls.  The chunk of the gears when you started it up, the click of the shutter while the movie showed, the high-pitched scritching as the film rewound onto the metal reel, and the final flap, flap flap of the tail end hitting the projector until someone turned it off.

I took those sounds as a matter of course, but these very young ones have probably only known DVDs.  They have never heard a projector going at the same time as the movie; never seen the reels spin and watched the film pack get smaller and smaller on the front reel and larger and larger on the back.  They know “put the disc in the player and push a button,” and maybe the sound of the drawer closing, but not the tension of “Will the teacher figure out how to thread the movie?  Will it slip the sprockets?  Will this contraption actually work?”

I’ve been thinking about projectors and sounds because I recently read The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick.  It’s about a boy and a man, clocks and wind-up toys, an automaton and silent movies, magic and dreams and making.  It took me several chapters to get into the groove of this work–a blend of wordless storytelling through pictures and traditional narrative.  The problem for me was not the switching back and forth between media, but the disconcerting way everything went dead quiet when the storytelling switched to the pictures.

Text is a voice in my head, graphic novels are filled with sound, and when I watch a movie, even when no one is speaking, there’s almost always music playing, or some sort of ambient sound from the world of the film.  With Hugo Cabret the black and white pictures were muted, the sound in my head just stopped, and it took me a while to accept the silence.  As the story built, I began to hear the sound of the movie projectors and clocks ticking–even when looking at the pictures–and I felt more comfortable. 

Certain mechanical sounds ground me in a world of human making.  I want to hear the world turning-not sliding quietly on its tracks.  Otherwise I fear I’ll end up like the characters in Georgie:  if the board on the stairs doesn’t creak a little, and the parlor door doesn’t squeak a little, then how will I know when it is time to go to bed?