Babes in the Woods

 

My dog, my walking stick, my grandson, my favorite picture of him on his folks’ forested property. That green is so fresh and beautiful it makes me gasp every time I look at it. The grandson turned 21 yesterday, the land is as old as the last lava flow, and I’m just a kid.

I have another grandson, a younger one, a would-be novelist. As he strode through the house the other day, I said, “Tell me about writing.”

“It’s to learn,” he said.

Hey, that’s brilliant.

“It isn’t to impart knowledge, then?” I asked.

“Nope,” he said.

Well, well, I learned that from the brilliant writing coach Natalie Goldberg, who said some 39 years ago in Writing Down the Bones that writing is a therapeutic experience.  One might think I would be healed from all cynicism by now, but this morning I hit some on the way to this page. DON’T DO THAT.

Unfortunately, I let headlines appear on my computer. From only a glance, something caught my eye—and I wondered, “How come we the people allow dictators to start wars for us, and then, once they are in office, it’s harder to dislodge them than it is to pry a fossilized trilobite from a boulder?”

And then—look there, we have babes in the woods, and my daughter snapped this one. “Fearless little deer.” She called it and said that he just kept getting closer and closer to her.

I remember my husband’s father, a hunter, trying to get a picture of a deer in the forest; we would look at the picture, and all we could see were trees and a thicket. “Where’s the deer?” we would ask.

Do the deer know the difference between a safe person and a dangerous one?

Do we?

Don’t let the beauty go away.

Let’s not allow our hearts to become hardened.

In the preface to the thirtieth edition of her book, Natalie describes reading to a class of third-graders. After reading a lengthy lament for all the people she had known, loved, and lost, she said she couldn’t come up with a title. Finally, one 9-year-old boy raised his hand. “How about,” he said, “The World Comes to Me.”

“Where did you get that?” Goldberg said as she almost fell backward.

He held up his palms, shook his head, and said, “Just thought it might work.” 

Facing the Page

 “Faced on the page, a difficult truth becomes a doorway… Where we are now becomes the stepping-point to where we’re headed next.” —Julia Cameron

From the Penguin Publishing Group

I did not remember why Harper Lee named her book To Kill a Mockingbird. I did not know what it meant.

I don’t know where I was when I first read that book many years ago—maybe I didn’t finish it. It is a book that will affect you differently at different times in your life.

I finished it this week.

“It’s a sin,” Atticus Finch tells his daughter Scout, “to kill a mockingbird.”

It was the only time she heard him use the word sin.  She doesn’t understand why and goes to her aunt, who tells her it’s because they do no harm. “They only sing their hearts out for us.”

Comments are that To Kill a Mockingbird symbolizes the loss of innocence. That's a gentle way of saying it. I say it represents the killing of innocence. Read the ending.

After Liz Gilbert commented on her podcast that To Kill a Mockingbird was the only book Harper Lee wrote, and she wished she had written others, I decided to look it up. She did, in fact, write another: Go Set a Watchman. It was written before To Kill a Mockingbird. The Watchman was rejected and morphed into the Mockingbird story. (See what a title can do?)

Here are the reasons I re-read Harper Lee’s book:

1.     I have heard for years that Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird is considered the Prima Donna of novels. (I wanted to know what that looked like.)

2.     It won the Pulitzer Prize. (What are they looking for?)

3.     It had been banned. (Why?)

To ban that book would insinuate that the reader couldn’t see beyond the racism, couldn’t see beyond the ignorance, and the mores of the Depression era in the 1930’s. It was rural South. It was ignorant. It was racist. Yet, out of that morass, a noble individual emerged. A man of character and integrity. Scout, the narrator, daughter of the lawyer Atticus Finch, forced to defend an innocent Black Man accused by a white woman, a losing battle right off the bat, was 6 years old, a wild child, trying to understand and having to draw her own conclusions while minding adult authorities. It was a tricky business.

My Kindle kept stopping while I was reading that book, and I would have to restart it. That was the only book where that happened. I was beginning to think I was being censored. And it made me realize once again how vulnerable we are putting our books on Kindles--convenient, yes. Inexpensive, yes. But a switch could turn them off.

My husband and I also watched the movie To Kill a Mockingbird. I had seen it in the 60s. He had not. Gregory Peck was superb as Atticus Finch. The film captured the book's essence beautifully.

 Shari Watts contributed this:

Live long, live well and prosper,