DO YOU HEAR WHAT I HEAR?

                                       

An essential part of Thanksgiving and Christmas for me is music. So I hold my breath until it’s confirmed that my brother Bill and his wife Cathy and daughters Christa and Abigail are 1) making the annual Thanksgiving trek to Cape Cod from Frederick, Maryland, and 2) bringing their instruments. Then I know for sure that when the Thanksgiving table is cleared and the kitchen is more or less under control, (thanks to sister Nancy a.k.a. the Dish Fairy” and others) we will reconvene in my living room to savor the holiday’s last, glorious treat: the gift of music.  

As individual professional musicians this Palmer crew has soloed vocally and instrumentally, taught fiddle, harp, and Irish step dancing, recorded numerous albums, and composed songs; as a family, they have been performing together at the Maryland Renaissance Festival for nearly 30 years. And I get them live in my living room!!

A born musician with an excellent voice, my brother Bill plays 12- and 6-string guitars and octave mandolin, as well as bodhran and djembe drums, all with a fluidity and grace that takes away my breath. His ability to inspire listeners was unforgettably witnessed by those sitting with him one summer day on the steps of my Cape Cod front porch. Bill was playing his djembe like a tribesman sending messages across an African plain. Apparently they were heard. Suddenly, out of the house directly across the street burst a man. My neighbor, the irrepressible Mickey McManus, claimed the street as his stage to imitate Bill’s increasingly wild drum beats. We still savor that fine memory of Life Unscripted.  

Cathy has played fiddle since she was a teenager and has a special ability in teaching children. I love watching the complete control she has over the strings and bow of a challenging instrument made in 1890. Many of the Celtic songs she plays are ancient pieces, undoubtedly sung with relish five hundred years ago by people living in unheated huts and castles.

She often closes her eyes as she plays, smiling I believe for the sheer joy of making music with her family, including grown daughters Christa and Abigail, both in their 20s. Abigail keeps a harp nearby the way a journalist keeps a notebook, just in case.  She idly plucks her harp during a conversation, producing what most of us would consider performance-ready music, but when she plays seriously she is a maestro orchestrating reflections on darkness, light, joy, or hope. Abigail has a personal relationship with her numerous harps, just as Christa has with her grandfather’s silver flute, which she plays so elegantly and effortlessly, and with her dancing shoes which she was devastated to nearly lose recently.

I cherish the Thanksgiving memory of Christa’s step dancing on the wood floor in front of my fireplace, those supple legs flying chest high, her blue eyes sparkling with laughter. This year I watched these four, my family, perform a Renaissance dance called Sellenger’s Round together.  As they circled and twirled Abigail played her harp and Christa played her flute, never missing a beat, a step, or a note. Cathy smiled at the joy while Bill, I suspect, was quietly bursting with pride.   

The rich and timeless sounds my talented family produces with wood, metal, gut and hide, as well as with feet, hands, and voice, resonate profoundly in my grateful heart. I know that music is a higher language. And I know that musicians receive the gift of music as fully as, or perhaps more than, their listeners.

*   *   *

Many years ago I impulsively responded to what I saw as a shameful lack of responsibility by my church in meeting the needs of an underserved if daunting population: junior high kids. Since I had one of my own, I knew what I was getting into, but we moralistic folk often find ourselves on the far end of a thin branch. So I volunteered to teach junior high Sunday school.

I am confident no lives were changed or re-directed, but I had the time of my life when I realized that you could ask 12- and 13-year-olds ANYTHING and they, unlike most adults, would give it their very best shot.

I’d long been fascinated by the indefinable power and might of music, a substance-less something that can make you cry when you are perfectly happy or raise the hairs on your arms when you are sitting, calmly eating a poached egg.  How can something you simply hear, something completely without immediate context, sooth or wrench the very heart within your chest?

So one Sunday out of sheer curiosity I asked my Sunday school class: what is music? I was unable to imagine what they might say but confident any answer would be an original thought, fresh as a snowflake, not memorized or learned, offered by a young person hovering between childhood and adulthood. 

After the slightest pause, an answer was provided by Jean Paul, and I’ve quoted him often: “Music is a noise that makes you feel good.”

See what I mean.

* * *

My best Christmas memories will always include one particular time my folk trio was hired to provide live Christmas entertainment at the Falmouth Mall. The trade-off for harried, often indifferent shoppers was great acoustics and, of course, payment. We always brought baskets of small instruments to pass out to children, encouraging them to join us in “Jingle Bells” and “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town.”

At that early morning hour only a few people were in the mall, and all of them were hurrying to get their shopping done. Except one very small boy. The little fellow’s face shone with delight as he stopped to listen to our guitars and flute. His father stood a few paces behind him, smiling broadly as he watched his child play jingle bells, sing “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” and other songs with us, and dance.

Soon another father and son joined them. The boy was older, a teenager apparently with a developmental disorder, and he also beamed with pleasure at hearing our music. He too began dancing, with considerably more proficiency than the younger child, and his father also looked on with enjoyment and obvious pride.

When it came time for us to do a periodic stroll through the mall with our instruments, we invited the boys and the dads to join us. Soon our short but enthusiastic parade was making its way through the Falmouth Mall: three middle-aged women in long skirts, followed by a little boy, a teenager, and two fathers, all singing loudly and playing instruments.

The gift of music, indeed.

Look on www.abigailpalmer.com for information on harpist Abigail Palmer’s CD “Sow Hope” which includes many songs she uses in music therapy programs for Hospice and other organizations. She wrote the title song and others on “Wine in the Knitting Basket,” a 2014 CD she recorded with her mother Cathy.

THIS NOVEMBER

Photo by Kathryn Kleekamp

Last night I read a Mary Oliver poem and today can viscerally feel the lingering impact of her consideration of what a soul is. As a longtime non-fiction writer, I am awed by what poets accomplish with exactly the same tools in my arsenal: words, punctuation, and a blank page. Occasionally I step outside proven proficiencies to write a poem. My objective is usually to simply say something of isolated importance or particular complexity. Sometimes it just feels good to play with the rhythm, descriptive words and imagery that distinguish poems. Maybe it’s the same impulse that leads birds to sing.

Out for a walk one November day in 2003, I was amazed to see crocuses blooming. In fact I found evidence of all four seasons. It intrigued me because November has always seemed to stand alone: not winter, not fall, not summer or spring. The following poem was an attempt to share that observation.

This November

spring’s lavender flowers bloom
among dead brown leaves below
green leaves holding to a willow branch
like old friends reluctant to part.

Frosty mornings become balmy days
become clear, cold, cobalt nights
crowded with stars and a restless moon
that moves among them with the solitary grace
of a lone swan in search of her mate.

November’s crisp air,
carries earthy odors, rough and worn,
good and used, like old hands.

At day’s end its black and coral skies

sprawl unrestrained and joyous,
like the work of a child
left alone in an art room.

November the loner, the balladeer
of rich songs colored with promise
and tainted with regret,
chronicler of the year's life
and death, hope and sorrow,
loss and gain;

these are November’s gifts

for those who are
inspired and healed
by change. 



Photo by Christie Lowrance

WAR, HONOR, AND MY COUSIN PHIL

Cambridge American Cemetery and Memorial

Two months ago I was in Scotland and England traveling with friends Maggie and Ian,  both formerly with the British Department of Defense. We saw extraordinarily historic sites, including Maiden Castle in Dorset, where a 6,000-year-old Iron Age settlement was invaded by Roman newcomers. But among the remarkable places we visited, none moved me more powerfully than the American cemetery sixty miles north of London, the only one of its kind in the United Kingdom.  

The solemn buildings and stark lines of pure white crosses were softened by a light morning mist as we drove up to the gates of the Cambridge American Cemetery and Memorial and parked, among the first to arrive at this early hour. At the Visitor’s Center interpretive guide Arthur Brookes urged us into an adjoining area where a film had just begun telling the story of the cemetery.

I sat down on a marble bench to listen. The American men and women buried here were mostly World War II airmen, but also members of the US Navy, Army, Marines and Coast Guard, nearly 4,000 in all, and the names of another 5,000 are inscribed on the Wall of the Missing. Unexpected tears ran down my cheeks as I watched aerial footage and cockpit recordings of doomed planes flown by boys who came willingly to fight and die on foreign land, so far from home. They were heartbreakingly young.

“In the UK we often think of the Americans in the War as the ones with cigarettes and chocolate,” Arthur Brookes told our small group afterwards. “But their effort made victory possible.” His careful, respectful account of that effort, as well as the cemetery’s pristine grounds and buildings with maps and plates depicting military movements, made clear that these American war dead and their vital role in a common Allied effort are honored every day.

 In 2014 we move through daily life in the U.S., often heedless of the true sacrifices American service men and women have made, and continue to make, around the world. But here in Cambridge, England, that sacrifice will never forgotten.  I left with deepest gratitude to Arthur Brookes and all who maintain the cemetery, and hope others will take time to visit. It is located three miles west of Cambridge, England on Highway A-1303 and is open daily from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.

* * *

My cousin Phil lives in Jacksonville, Florida, which you know as much by his drawl as by his address. Like many cousins, we stay loosely in touch, and every couple years there’s a marathon phone call to catch up. I’m fond of all my cousins, but two things distinguished Phil: he was an Eagle Scout back when we were kids, and even I, his Massachusetts younger cousin, knew that was a considerable accomplishment. Also, he loves trees, perhaps more than I do, at least he knows them better. Every now and then he sends me a box of fragrant split pine fatwood from his land in southern Florida. Somewhere in the box there is always one piece of paper or kindling with the provenance of the tree within. I keep them, of course, who could simply burn such a record.
One says, for example:

Long leaf yellow pine
Planted? 1920-1930’s
Killed by lightning
Knocked down by tornado in 2004
Cut to dry in 2006
Split by hand 11/18/2007  

A few years ago I learned that Phil honored my father, along with trees, Scouting, and his cherished wife Helen and their children. We were having one of our marathon catch-up calls on Veterans Day. I was intrigued to hear him say, “You know, I think of your father on this day every year.”

We often talked about Daddy, but I was surprised to hear that this day had a special association with him. “In World War II he was in the thick of it,” Phil said. “And he volunteered. He was one of millions of other people who did the same thing, but he was one of us, one of our family.  He was in harm’s way and he did his best.”

My father, Howard V.R. Palmer, had married and joined the U.S. Navy in 1941. My parents shared their first Christmas together at the training center in Hanover, New Hampshire. With separation by wartime combat facing them, the only memory they shared, laughing, was always that their tiny fake musical tree was completely dwarfed by presents.

In 1944, he was a U.S. Navy lieutenant on LST 359, a troop landing ship delivering English soldiers to Normandy and returning for more. If you saw the opening half hour of “Saving Private Ryan” you saw what troop landing ships were doing. His ship was torpedoed, the captain killed. Although my father’s back was broken, he kept command of the ship until they got to England. He was soon on his way to a military hospital in Norfolk, Virginia. He also participated in military action at Anzio and Salerno in Italy. It was a miracle I ever met him.

When Phil graduated from the Navy Officer Candidate School in Newport, Rhode Island, my father and I drove down for the ceremony. “My instructors took one look at the medals on his chest, and they knew exactly where he had been in World War II and what he had been doing,” said Phil. “They went to him like he was a magnet. I don’t think I had understood how important he was, but they did.”

On Veterans Day, I'll always know that my cousin Phil, who worked as chief engineer on several Navy vessels, is remembering my father and honoring his deeds and actions of more than half a century ago.  

I thank him for that, as well as for the fatwood.


P.S. I was sending Phil a fatwood thank-you bottle of Johnny Walker Scotch until a few years ago when he requested that, instead, I make a donation to the Wounded Warriors organization. And I pass along his recommendation.  

TALKING WITH THORNTON BURGESS

Photo courtesy of Sandwich Glass Museum

Some years ago I had an assignment with Cape Cod Life to write an article on Plimoth Plantation in Plymouth, Massachusetts.  I spent more than three hours watching and listening to first-person interpreters in the Pilgrim and Native American villages chat among themselves and with visitors from all over the world as they swept out dwellings, chopped wood, waited for delicious-smelling bread to bake, and completed other daily tasks. The longer I stayed, the more the line between appearance and reality eroded. I knew perfectly well it was the twentieth century, but the seventeenth century was so real.  It was an unsettling sensation.

Last week I had a similar experience with the eerie spell that trained first- person interpreters weave.  David Hobbs has spent more than thirty years portraying Pilgrim-era characters, including five years at Plimoth Plantation, and for fourteen years, he has enacted children’s author and naturalist Thornton W. Burgess, the subject of my recent biography, Nature’s Ambassador. Hobbs gives walking tours in Sandwich Village where Burgess was born, as well as school programs and other presentations.  (Since I live in Burgess’ birthplace, I’m on the tour; on more than one occasion, I’ve had to speed out to the front porch in advance of his group’s arrival to grab wine bottles and glasses from the previous night’s gathering.)

As a Pilgrim or as Thornton Burgess, David Hobbs is at ease.
“When I’m in costume, I’m somebody else, so I’m not particularly self-conscious,” he says. “I’ve learned how to ‘hide’ David within the costume and make sure the character is more prevalent.”   However, he does recall feeling notably awkward traveling on the Vineyard ferry in full Pilgrim gear to do a private performance for Princess Diana and Chelsea Clinton.  His 6’4” height helps carry off the Burgess persona - the popular author was six feet tall - and David is as naturally modest and self-effacing as his character.  

For Sandwich’s 375th “Talk of the Town” lecture series, he had been invited to give a talk in character and I was asked to introduce him.  When we got together to discuss the event, we hit on an intriguing idea: why not go beyond the introduction and actually interact while he was on stage, he as Burgess and I as Burgess’ biographer.

The thought took hold immediately.  What biographer hasn’t dreamed of being able to ask their subject about puzzling, complex or unexplained aspects of their life? What would I ask Thornton Burgess? I must admit, the first thing that immediately came to mind was if he was offended by my reading his journals. I have kept journals for decades and the thought of someone pawing through them is beyond repugnant. 

So David and I decided to prepare a few topics I would introduce in the form of questions following his formal introduction, including the following:

• Although you’re best known as a children’s author, you didn’t start out in that field. Will you talk about your career as a journalist? Was it hard to make the transition from journalist to children’s writer?

• You are known for your productivity—for example, you wrote nine books in 1915. Was it difficult to find things to write about?
• You and your mother lived in ten different houses in Sandwich village. What was moving around like? What do you remember of the town, of Shawme Pond, of the glass factory?

As I sat in the front row of the Sandwich Glass Museum auditorium waiting for David to call on me, I listened to his the effortless impersonation of Thornton Burgess, and realized that I was actually eager and excited to hear him answer my questions. It was going to be as close as I would get to actually talking with Thornton Burgess.

We planned an exchange around Burgess’ father, Thornton W. Burgess, Sr. a locally admired young man who died of tuberculosis at the age of twenty-four. His baby was ten months old and his widow Caroline was twenty-two. In Now I Remember, Thornton Burgess’s biography, the author mentioned that a woman wrote him saying she had often seen his mother Caroline walking in the cemetery with a little boy, and asked if it was him.  

I recalled this letter as my last question and was surprised by his grave, almost sad, response: “Yes, I was that little boy.” When we talked later about the presentation, he offered an explanation. “The fact was, around the time I started my Burgess portrayal, my own father passed,” he said. “Thinking of him helped me apply to the fact that I as Burgess never met my father, and was indeed that innocent young boy who held his mother’s hand so tightly as they walked through the cemetery.  I actually teared up tonight when I was talking about it.”

Apparently appearance and reality blur for first-person interpreters as well as for their audiences.

Watch for this “Talk of the Town” program on Sandwich Community Television – and who knows, David and I may go on the road with “Conversations with Thornton Burgess!”  

         

THROUGH AND THROUGH

In complete darkness, I creep like a burglar up an unlighted stairway from the basement apartment in my son Rob’s house. I’m trying desperately to avoid the loudest creaking steps because five people, including two small children, are asleep nearby, but no such luck. I get a few sleepy kisses before starting my 90-minute drive to the Children’s Literature Festival in Keene, New Hampshire.

With the requisite cup of coffee beside me, I head north on Route 2. A thin layer of fog lingers on fields I pass in this rural part of mid-Massachusetts, but morning sunlight is working its golden magic on the treetops. As miles pass I notice the rising grade of the road, a meaningful change to someone who lives on a coastal peninsula at an altitude of twelve feet. The hills are becoming higher, the valleys deeper, and the views across them showcase fall’s finest colors: vivid reds, yellows, browns and golds that set off classic white church steeples and houses in the small towns I’m driving past. Is there a more beautiful month than October to be in New England?

With only a minor glitch (or three), I arrive at Keene State College on time, get my information packet, more coffee,  and settle into a seat at the back of the auditorium to listen to the speakers discuss their work as children’s book writers and illustrators. Since I have a children’s book manuscript in the hands of a literary agent, as well as a published biography of a children’s writer to sell, I’m here to learn what I can.

The speakers described their paths to successful careers with humor and insight, but one young woman electrified me, an illustrator whose words echoed the deepest truths I know as a writer. Pamela Zagarenski of Mystic, Connecticut is a small-framed, dark-haired woman with dark eyes who referenced the “Lithuanian gypsy” in her during the talk. She has illustrated such award-winning books as Sleep Like a Tiger and Red Sings from the Treetops, also paints large murals, and has a card line.   

As a presenter she had me at her opening sentence: “I didn’t become an illustrator to be a public speaker,” she said, nervously admitting her nervousness. SO true! I thought. You don’t imagine the pressure of giving radio and television interviews (see www.christielowrance.com) and hour-long talks when you’re wearing a sweatshirt and no makeup in the comfy confines of your office. I realized she was talking less about being the illustrator of successful books and more about her relationship to her work, her love and joy in the artist’s path. I started furiously making notes to capture her words and wished I had my tape recorder or a smart phone.

“I have drawn every day of my life,” Pamela said. “I have always wanted to illustrate. When people ask what do you want to do with your life, I’ve never had a different answer. And I’ve never questioned my answer: I would be an illustrator of children’s books. I’m an illustrator through and through. And my choices were made, conscious or not, for art.”  

I understand. Words have always made sense to me, it has always felt right to be writing. I started keeping a journal when I was ten, and my home today has countless drawers and shelves that contain a stash of diaries, journals and notebooks, some pictured in the heading of this blog, including that first cherished Girl Scout diary, second from the right. 

To settle into my desk chair with hours and hours of writing ahead of me is THE best. To talk about writing with other writers is THE best.  To un-garble the garbled, to wrestle with an unruly paragraph and win another victory for Clarity and Concision, to create life in an inert sentence, these are THE best.  To be writing just feels good.

I’ve known many creative people: sculptors, screen writers, watercolorists, oil painters, musicians, jewelers, actors, as well as writers. We create for money, oh yes, and would that we all earned much, much more than we do, but as Pamela said, there is a deeper truth, which we can choose to accept, ignore or reject, which is that creativity is part of who we are, part of our identity. To give time and a place in daily life to our creativity, in whatever form or level of proficiency it takes, is to accept and honor ourselves.

And in that acceptance is real contentment. When I write, I feel peaceful, I feel whole. Some express their creativity with acrylic paint or charcoal, with clay or stone, with a spray paint can, with paper cuts, with needle and thread, with a forge, with a cello or flute.  Some people see visions called poems, others conjure up non-existent characters to come alive on stage, screen, television or the printed page.  Creative people know or at least sense it is possible that they will express some thing the entire world has never seen or heard or felt before. That’s a wildly heady and exciting thought. 

“I’m an illustrator through and through,” Pamela Zagarenski said.  I SO love that. Yes. I’m a writer through and through.

Note: The relationship between writers/artists/creative people and their work will be the subject of future posts.  

 

 

THORNTON BURGESS AND THE BRADFORD WASHBURN AWARD

Hi, I've taken a considerable break from this blog for diverse reasons, some more valid than others, but never lost my original intention of writing consistently about 1) the research and writing that went into Nature's Ambassador: The Legacy of Thornton W. Burgess, a 320-page biography published in 2013; 2) reflections on the art and craft of writing which I've accumulated in 30 years of professional writing and college-level teaching; and 3) life as it finds me.
I look forward to any questions and comments from readers who share my endless love and appreciation for the written word. Let's talk. 

On October 23, 2014 the Boston Museum of Science celebrates the 50^th anniversary of the prestigious H. Bradford Washburn, Jr. Award which honors its longtime director, a mountaineer, cartographer, photographer and author. Recipients have included Jacques-Yves Cousteau, Dr. Jane Goodall, Dr. Isaac Asimov, Dr. Mary D. Leakey, Stephen Jay Gould, and Walter Cronkite. 

One particular aspect of the Bradford Washburn Award’s history deserves a footnote.

Around 1964 a grateful trustee had proposed to acknowledge Washburn’s distinguished accomplishments and service with an award for individual contributions to science and science literacy.  The selection committee was comprised of Richard Borden, Mass Audubon Society president; Erwin Canham, Christian Science Monitor editor-in-chief; and Bradford Washburn.  They selected Dr. Melville Bell Grosvenor, grandson of Alexander Graham Bell, as the first recipient.

But Washburn realized that among proposed recipients were people who had uniquely inspired his own dedication to science and nature. He requested that a personal award be given, that year only, to three people: Gilbert Grosvenor, founder and president of the National Geographic Society; Kirtley Mather, Harvard geology professor; and naturalist and children’s author Thornton W. Burgess who was also a member of the Museum of Science board of trustees.

In researching Burgess’ biography Nature’s Ambassador, I came across touching personal correspondence regarding that special award. Burgess was 90 years old and recovering from a stroke in a Hampden, Massachusetts nursing home when Bradford Washburn informed him of the award that would be presented at the organization’s annual meeting:  “Your wonderful books had a tremendous effect on my love of nature as a youngster,” Bradford wrote. “I read them avidly as the first English prose I ever tackled alone... I don’t need to tell you what a tremendous debt of gratitude I owe you for all that you have done for me and millions of other youngsters.”

Although Burgess’ failing health prevented him from attending the 1964 presentation in Boston, Brad Washburn and his wife Barbara hand-delivered the gold medal award to him at the Mary Lyon Nursing Home. According to manager Louis Levine, Thornton Burgess had whispered to him: “This is the highlight of my career.”     

A PRESCHOOL EPIPHANY

Undated photo, circa 1950s, a classroom visit by children's author Thornton Burgess



A few weeks ago I experienced an epiphany, the kind that lingers in your mind in the days that follow it.  I had just dropped my four-year-old granddaughter off in her classroom at a daycare center in Arlington, Massachusetts. Children there were eagerly tackling such morning activities as painting, assembling building materials, and creating special projects. She had time for a quick hug good-by before dashing into the thick of things.

I could still hear the enthusiastic purposefulness as I walked downstairs to leave. At the bottom of the staircase I started to turn right to the door outside. But something caught my eye. I came to a full stop before a closed preschool classroom door in order to read a poster on it. “Things We Want to Learn” was the title. Below it was each student’s name and the specific subject he or she wanted to learn about. I was curious to see what young children considered worthy of learning. 

“Sea creatures” was notably popular. I imagined it had been the recent focus of the teacher’s efforts. I pictured small hands waving wildly as children shouted out other topics, such as “Pirates,” “Kitty Kats,” and “Pets.”  Some showed a natural science bent with their interest in learning about “The rain forest” and “Giraffes.” One child wanted to learn about “Numbers.” Ah, indeed. I remembered approaching my mother after I had gotten a solid grip on addition, subtraction and multiplication. I had heard intriguing rumors of something else you could do with numbers, and demanded, as if she had been keeping a secret from me, “There is another thing, isn’t there?” I pestered her until she explained division to me.

“Blueberries and strawberries” was another choice. I pictured a small child looking at a bowl of these lovely fruits and wondering why one is red and tapered and the other blue and round. Children consider these things when we give them time, while we adults are more likely to focus on eating them and the calorie count. But my favorite subject that one child wanted to learn about was “Clouds.” Can’t you see this child playing outside, maybe on a swing or at the very top of some piece of climbing equipment. Looking up, he or she may have observed clouds passing overhead, and idly wondered, “Why do they move like that? What are they made of? Where are they going?”  Answers aside, when was the last time you or I asked such good questions?   

As I stood in the hallway studying this fine documentation of preschool educational aspiration, I so appreciated the thrill of learning that children bring into the jaded, answer-burdened world we adults have designed. Children aren’t ashamed to ask questions, and they want clear, simple, useful answers. (Admittedly I wouldn’t be helpful in explaining the life cycle of a cloud.) Children respect learning for learning’s sake. They trust knowledge will become useful sooner or later, so the more they can accumulate, the better. Plus, it just feels good to know things.  It feels good to know that 3 + 2 = 5 or 9 X  2 = 18, especially when others don’t. I particularly enjoy knowing, for example, that the Erie Canal was completed in 1825. For those like me fortunate enough to have children in their lives, it’s our job to satisfy the childhood craving for knowledge with patience for one more question, one more childish  observation. Our patience is important because, for one thing, the information we provide might actually turn out to be useful, and for another, the craving will pass as children become teenagers who know everything.

To a great extent my respect for naturalist and children’s author Thornton Burgess, the subject of my biography Nature’s Ambassador, is based to his superb grasp of a child’s love of learning. One fourth grade boy was asked by Anne Carroll Moore, the legendary New York Public Library librarian, to explain  his delight in Thornton Burgess books. “He sees what I see and I understand his language,” the boy responded. Burgess never considered children an inferior audience, never wrote down to them, and never used his children’s books as a launch pad for adult books. He shared a child’s abiding interest in learning about the natural world. Nature, Burgess maintained, was endlessly attractive to children, and therefore was the perfect tool for learning. His 1924 article in Nature magazine stated the belief that environmental education should be taught in every curriculum from kindergarten through 12th grade. 

As I walked back to my car, I thought about that preschool poster covered with intellectual ambition. Then a new question popped into my mind: “What do I - as a Nana-aged person – want to learn?”  Not what do I want to do or be or have in my linen closet, but what do I want to learn about? What do I want to understand? What an exciting question! So far I have decided on:  shipwrecks, roses/peonies/morning glories/trees, care and feeding of the soul, glorious writing, Saint Margaret and King Malcolm of Scotland, and where the shut-off values for water are in my house. And Nature, of course. And clouds and numbers, definitely!