As I walked to work this morning I stopped and snapped a picture of one of my neighbor’s tree decorations. It caught my attention from about a block away when there was still a bit of fog in the air and I thought, “yeah, that’s scary. If I was a kid looking up at that in the bush, I’d be scared, at night.” I do have to admit though, that as an adult, a bush full of tent caterpillars (army worms) would be scarier because of the gross factor.
People frequently stop me to talk about this article now and one of the things they ask me is “how do you have something to write about every week, what inspires you?” Honestly, it’s a hard thing to explain, like trying to describe to people what kind of antiques that I’m always looking for.
I know if I like something, if I’m interested in buying, when I’m holding it. When I see it, I gotta feel it and get to know it. That’s what it is like when I write. I need to spend some time with the ideas and see where they go. Sometimes you just have to try something on for size. You know what I mean?
Also, I’ve learned to trust myself and the words I hear before my fingers type them. This skill has been honed quite a bit by writing poetry on demand for folks in the park. I have to shut out distractions, work within a ten or fifteen minute time limit because they’re coming back quick and I still have to be courteous and attentive to other customers who show up and engage and want poems of their own and friends that stop by and… and… and there’s a squirrel… This spooky, scary Halloween time reminds me that as a kid my favorite books were by Richard Scarry. I read almost everything he wrote and I loved the illustrations. I felt like Huckle and Lowly and Stitches and Mortimer and Bugdozer and Gorilla Bananas were my friends. I was a believer. It wasn’t hard to see my own world as the one that was laid out on all those beautifully colored pages.
In my mind it was only natural that given my own relationships with all my animals that there was a whole Busytown full of talking, working, fun-loving animals. It seemed natural to me that Stitches’ family owned a five decker car with all of their bikes tied down with a tarp up on top and I figured that if a pipe burst in the school, the gymnasium would for sure fill up like a swimming pool.
I envisioned a town meal where everyone sat down at the end of the day after work and ate hot dogs with orange drink together. Dessert was a birthday cake and pink Tutti Frutti ice cream delivered by bicycle. In fact, why don’t we do that here for the next Chapman Street Block Party?! I learned how things work and how they break and how to get along. I learned where things go and how to put them back and how to treat people and how not to. I learned that people are all different. Different shapes, different colors, different sizes, from different places and those differences not only made the community great, they were necessary. I learned all of these things without knowing that I was learning them.
Richard Scarry wasn’t scary, but it is scary to think of my childhood without him. I wonder now, over 50 years later, why I put those books aside for so long? I marvel a bit that they are still being published, brand spankin’ new, and available in bookstores everywhere today. I love them so much. I’m remembering how I thought soup and pancakes was perfectly normal for dinner and how sandwiches were supposed to have so many layers they rose from the table to the top of your head and how many steps it took after you mailed a letter for it to arrive. I knew how much work stay-at-home mom’s had to do and how it never seemed to stop when Huckle’s dad got home. I learned what warp meant when weaving cloth and what a shuttle was and for those reasons when I later got into space travel and Star Trek, I was confused.
I learned that banana peels were bad for motorcycles and bicycles and that has subsequently saved my life countless times.
Leafing through page after page of some of my old books with deteriorated bindings and a few scuffed pages, I do find myself a little scared. Scared that these treasures might soon be missed or never even seen by generations to come that won’t know the pleasure of holding a huge board book in your lap with so much happening on every page that you have to study them and that you almost certainly have to have fun while reading them.
What am I writing about this time? Think that’s it. There’s too much going on in our lives right now. Friends going through cancer surgeries and treatments and life changes and death and moving and health issues with children and fires and house explosions and everything in the news on a minute to minute basis and the inevitable changes that life’s pages bring to us. Naturally, we have to turn those pages. Naturally, we (or most of us anyway), find that we have to turn to faith of some kind to help us turn those pages. All of this is scary.
For me, though, all of this is Scarry, as in Richard, in one way or another. A long time ago, when I was very young, God showed me that it was going to work out. One of the ways he did this was by instilling in me the trust in what I like to refer to as “the magical properties of the unknown.”
Richard Scarry understood how to make the mundane, the everyday, the busy into something magical. At least for me, he helped to make me a believer in not only others, but in myself. He painted life as a beautiful box of 64 crayola crayons with their own built in sharpener. Yeah, they might never, ever fit back into that box and line up the way they were when you first opened it, but they were meant to be together and only by using them together could you create some of the most magical things imaginable.
I need more Scarry. We all do.
