Yesterday, I spent the day at the elementary school in my town, Warner, NH. A K-5 school with fewer than two hundred students. Warner is not a wealthy community, certainly not as tony as Hopkinton, our rich neighbor to the south, and several tax bumps down from New London, to the north. And yet, thanks to a dedicated administration and skilled, responsive teachers, these kids are getting as good an education as you can get in the state. Maybe even better. This was proved by my receipt of some impromptu, unedited writing the fifth graders did after an initial Q and A. Their work was imaginitive, yes, but it was also nearly flawless at the sentence level. They handled the consternating punctuation of dialogue better than many college students. Commas after introductory elements? No problem. One child even used a semicolon correctly. (It separates two independent clauses, in case you were wondering.) It was very heartening to see children in such effortless (or so it seemed) control of their language. Perhaps it’s not the Fall of Rome after all. At least in Warner.

The event was part of the annual Literacy Project, organized and funded in part by Main Street Warner, Inc, the Warner Fall Foliage Festival, and the Simonds PTO. Through this program, every child receives at least one free book. As I heard someone say yesterday, by the end of the fifth grade every child will have the start of her own library. For some of these kids, these may be the only books they own.

Here’s a poem the kindergarten, first grade and I wrote together after a responsive reading of And Here’s to You!

Here’s to the worms!
The Jiggly People worms.
Here’s to the squiggly ones,
the wishy-washy wiggly ones.
And here’s to the slimy ones,
the in-this-poem-they’re rhymy ones.
Oh, I love the worms!

Picture credit goes to Kimberly Brown Edelmann.

Yes, I’m a grown man. And yes, I DID write a book called Wuv Bunnies from Outers Pace. And to prove it, here are a bunch of kids in Bangkok reading it.

Wuv Bunnies is completely silly. The bad bunny has a lisp and wears braces. The good bunnies smooch the protagonist and anyone else they can get their paws on. And why not? They are Wuv Bunnies, after all. What did you expect?

Though many adults have forgotten it, silliness has its place in the world. Not everything children read has to teach them something, does it? Not everything has to be laden with a life lesson? How about laughter for laughter’s sake? Isn’t that enough.

But here’s the funny thing about books. Just like our children, once they’re out in the world, they develop a life of their own. And just like our children, they surprise us. Wuv Bunnies in Bangkok? Who knew? Even better, sometimes the surprise goes beyond the geographical. A year or so ago, I received an email from a woman who worked with an autistic boy, a boy who, like many kids on the spectrum, didn’t like to be touched. But he read Wuv Bunnies and all that changed. Now, he smooches his caretaker on the nose and allows her to do the same to him. Once again, who knew?

This story makes me happy for many reasons. For the boy and his caretaker of course. But it also reinforces my commitment to the subversive idea that in spite of our protestations otherwise, we know little about the workings of the human heart. It gladdens me to know that a book so silly as Wuv Bunnies from Outers Pace can sometimes do more than years of therapy, and that reason and logic are sometimes edged out by humor. I’m encouraged, too, to know that life is still so completely, so fabulously unpredicatable.

Yes, I’m a grown man. And yes I DID write a book called Wuv Bunnies from Outers Pace.

Last Saturday morning, I had the honor of sharing the stage with the inimitable Anita Silvey, children’s author Lenore Look, and Terri Schmitz, owner of The Children’s Book Shop in Brookline, MA. The four of us had been invited to participate in a program of The Foundation for Children’s Books. Our audience was made up of school librarians, teachers, college professors and graduate students, anyone, in fact, interested in kids and what they read.

In addition to providing support for those responsible for putting books into kids’ hands, the Foundation has another mission. From its website: The FCB, in collaboration with school districts, arranges author and illustrator visits to under-served elementary and middle schools.

Underserved. In other words, schools in poor neighborhoods. Currently, there are over fourteen million poor children living in America. Yes. Fourteen million! Right under our noses. The FCB makes sure that at least some of those kids get the same enrichment as their peers living in more affluent neighbodhoods. That’s no small thing. In doing so, who knows? They could be fostering the spirit of the next great American novelist. Or scientist. Or politician.

But not everybody need grow up to be a hero. Maybe it’s enough that organizations like the FCB let poor children know that someone is paying attention, that they matter, too.

This little guy is our neighborhood mascot. Barbara and I saw him in the snow this morning, just outside our kitchen window. He stood for a minute or two, looked at us looking at him, then loped into a small stand of maples. In less than fifteen seconds he re-emerged, a dove (I think) in his mouth. I have a lot of affection for this fox, more, certainly, than my neighbors do. He raids their henhouse. I’ve been thinking of writing a picture book in his honor, but haven’t come up with anything worthy of him. Not yet, anyway. But stories sometimes surprise us, appearing all at once and out of nowhere. Or so it seems. Just like a fox.
Scroll down, by the way, for a poem written by the foxy first graders at the William Rowe School in Yarmouth, Maine.