Tell Me A Story

When my grandchildren were younger, I made an effort to force on their parents the children’s books of my era. I knew they’d get plenty of Seuss and Scarry, but wasn’t so sure if the Little Golden books, Oz and the classic fairy tales from Grimm, Andersen and Perrault were still in vogue.

They liked some of these, but others may have been shouldered aside by new favorites like Harry Potter. Now seven, they are avidly consuming the new to me “I Survived” series in which kid role models manage to come out alive on the other side of the Great Chicago Fire, the sinking of the Titanic, Pearl Harbor, The American Revolution, and Mt. St. Helens blowing its top.

I am of two minds about this. I’m all for learning a little history, but “I Survived 9/11” is a far cry from the more anodyne “Johnny Tremain” or “Ben and Me” that we read. I suppose the survive books are about allaying fears in a time perceived to be perilous, or maybe they just reflect an era when most books or movies for anyone under 50 seem to concern shoot-outs, explosions or disasters.

I must say no one thought to produce I survived Joe McCarthy or the Tet Offensive or Polio or the Cuban Missile Crisis for kids in my childhood. We were already freaked enough. The world was just as complicated and terrifying then, but grown-ups didn’t talk about it with kids, though we were perfectly aware of it. Of course, all of this ignores the fact that when the supposedly less spooky fairy tales we were fed were first told, big, bad wolves and wicked stepmothers weren’t a fantasy, but a documentary.

I suppose it may be better that today there are kids books to console young people in the face of death, or to teach them to accept diversity, blended families and households containing two mommies or daddies. Still, trying to postpone the day when innocence gave way to wised up wasn’t all bad.

Thinking back on those simpler times, I have also been struck less by what’s present in kiddie lit today than what’s missing. In Little Gold Books like “Scuffy the Tugboat,” “Seven Little Postmen,” and many others kids were introduced to a busy world of work, productivity and commerce.

A letter from a kid in town travels by postman’s bag to a sorting floor to train to truck to the mailbox of grandma’s farm in the country. Scuffy slips from a child’s grasp into a brook and off he goes, past lumberjacks rolling logs into a river, under bridges in industrial towns, past a city wth skyscrapers. In other books, a steam shovel excavates the foundations for one of those skyscrapers, farmers raise crops and animals that will feed us, puddlers produce steel that will rise into the sky where riveters attach one beam to another.

By contrast, today’s plugged-in kids live in a digital universe populated by more transformers than humans, and divorced from the bustling, complex, real world where humans earn their bread (and bake it) by the sweat of their brows and the ingenuity of their brains.

I’m not arguing for nostalgia for yesterday’s kiddie lit or criticizing today’s. I’m just noting the change, admittedly based on a less than large sample. Children’s tales have always had a fondness for Wonderland, Neverland, days in Oz and nights in Arabia, with heroes and villains, magicians and wizards and witches, oh my.

As Stephen Sondheim, by way of Bruno Bettelheim, suggested in “Into The Woods,” these adventures weren’t just exciting but performed as a surrogate for psychologically counseling. They were concerned with speaking to the inner life of kids with all their fears and perplexities as they try to adapt and evolve in a hard to understand world that they never made but nevertheless had to inhabit.

The little books of my day did that, but they also contained a celebration of what a big, kaleidoscopically interesting place the quotidian world is with trains and planes and threshing machines, traffic cops and bus drivers, factories and foundries and laboratories. We read little biographies of Goddard with his rockets, Edison and his inventions. We got to imagine being everyday heroes, not just superheroes. Does that still happen in kiddie lit? I hope so. We can’t all be Harry Potter or Katniss Everdeen.

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