On retaining the desire to fly
I'm currently on a flight back to New York! During the last few weeks, I spent some time in Seattle and Walla Walla, WA being a tourist and then visiting some relatives, respectively. In Seattle I ate amazing fruits at Pike Place, walked by the water in the early morning with my dad and sister, and met up with a friend from a piano camp who I’d last seen almost a decade ago. We were fast friends then, and I can’t tell if our meeting went so smoothly this time because we’re still friends or because we still just have the same initial friend chemistry. I guess probably too much has changed for us to still be friends (not sure if this made any sense). In Walla Walla, I went with relatives on a short trip to a nearby lake and mountain, hiked up some trails, went kayaking, and picked blueberries. For some reason while picking the blueberries, I was set on replicating this scene I’d always loved from one of my favorite storybooks as a kid, Blueberries for Sal:
Sal and her mom spent all day picking blueberries and then filled jars with freshly made jam!
I find that as I grow older, I appreciate children’s books more and more. I wonder sometimes if it’s because I’ve slowly grown tired of networking, of shallow relationships, of pots and pans and rent — and I want to instead think of true love, trapdoors, and the desire to fly. C.S. Lewis once said something about fairy tales that I liked: ‘When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.’ (Then again, maybe another way of saying all this is I just want to shun the responsibilities of adulthood…)
I had emailed one of my favorite childhood authors once with these thoughts, about how finally after starting to work on things that might be considered ‘serious’ in grad school, all I wanted to do was recall the simple and silly things. I thanked him for writing what remains one of my favorite children’s books, Okay for Now, which I still reread at least every couple years — it has a pureheartedness that helps to remind me of the kind of things that are important. And I asked him what he’d been reading. I’m not sure what else I expected, but he recommended me a couple other children’s books to read ('Have you tried Jarrett Krosoczka's "Sunshine"?'). I borrowed them from the library, felt somewhat validated in my desire to read children’s books, and to validate myself further found and read this article which I really enjoyed. Here are some quotes I noticed from the article:
"My 12-year-old self wanted autonomy, peril, justice, food, and above all a kind of density of atmosphere into which I could step and be engulfed. My adult self wants all those things, and also: acknowledgements of fear, love, failure; of the rat that lives within the human heart. So what I try for when I write... is to put down in as few words as I can the things that I most urgently and desperately want children to know and adults to remember. Those who write for children are trying to arm them for the life ahead with everything we can find that is true. And perhaps, also, secretly, to arm adults against those necessary compromises and necessary heartbreaks that life involves: to remind them that there are and always will be great, sustaining truths to which we can return."
"I vastly prefer adulthood to childhood – I love voting, and drinking, and working. But there are times in adult life – at least, in mine – when the world has seemed blank and flat and without truth.... Children's books say: the world is huge. They say: hope counts for something. They say: bravery will matter, wit will matter, empathy will matter, love will matter. These things may or may not be true. I do not know. I hope they are."
And now here are some pictures of blueberries and jam, hikes, kayaking:
And a whimsical yet serious poem I like about appreciating silly things. Thank you for reading my post!
"Today" by Frank O'Hara
Oh! Kangaroos, sequins, chocolate sodas!
You really are beautiful! Pearls,
harmonicas, jujubes, aspirins! All
the stuff they’ve always talked about
still makes a poem a surprise!
These things are with us every day
even on beachheads and biers. They
do have meaning. They’re as strong as rocks.