The Willoughbys

When my children were small, the thing that got me through the eight-thousand- nine-hundred-and-eleventh reading of Goodnight Moon was reading Boom Baby Moon by Sean Kelly. Similarly, I could cope with Pat the Bunny because of Pat the Beastie by Henrik Drescher and Pat the Stimpy by Ren Hoek. So when I heard about Lois Lowry's The Willoughbys, a parody of classic children's books, I knew I had to read it.

After spending my own childhood with the books listed at the back of The Willoughbys as "books of the past that are heavy on piteous but appealing orphans, ill-tempered and stingy relatives, magnanimous benefactors, and transformations wrought by winsome children" (to which I would add Half Magic and The Penderwicks, after reading them to my own children), I was quite conversant with the conventions of stories about plucky and under-supervised children, and pleased to find that Lowry doesn't miss a one.

In the first chapter, a baby is left on the doorstep of the Willoughby family house and we are told
"this happens quite often in old-fashioned stories. The Bobbsey Twins, for example, found a baby on their doorstep once. But it had never happened to the Willoughbys before. The baby was in a wicker basket and wearing a pink sweater that had a note attached to it with a safety pin.
'I wonder why Father didn't notice it when he left for work,' Barnaby A said, looking down at the basket, which was blocking the front steps to their house."
When they tell their mother about the baby, she says "Take it someplace else, children."

Later the parents have a conversation after the children have been sent to bed. The mother is knitting and the father, who is holding a newspaper, asks
"Do you like our children?"
"Oh, no," Mrs. Willoughby said..."I never have. Especially that tall one. What is his name again?"
"Timonthy Anthony Malachy Willoughby."
"Yes, him. He's the one I least like. But the others are awful, too. The girl whines incessantly, and two days ago she tried to make me adopt a beastly infant."

The Willoughby children leave the baby at a house down the street, the house of "Mr. Melanoff--called Commander Melanoff for no particular reason except that he liked the sound of it" where he
"lived in squalor. Squalor is a situation in which there is moldy food in the refrigerator, mouse droppings are everywhere, the wastebaskets are overflowing because they have not been emptied in weeks, and the washing machine stopped working months before--wet clothes within becoming moldy--but a repairman has never been summoned. There is a very bad smell to squalor."

Admittedly, the definition part reminds me of the Series of Unfortunate Events books, but it's just one of Lowry's many techniques for making fun of the conventions of classic children's books. There's also the name the children pin to the baby, Ruth, because they are Ruthless (that goes at least back to Arthur Ransome's heroine Nancy), the stack of unopened letters that turns out to reveal a surprise, the unlikely reunion of the only two members of a family who wanted to be reunited, and the eventual adoption of the Willoughby children by Mr. Melanoff (who has changed because of Ruth), and the children's nanny, who has married him.

It won't take you long to read this one, and if you're still at the stage of needing to be refreshed in between readings of the same old books to your children, it can restore your equanimity.

Bad Boats

In February I put away the flexible plastic tubes that have been hanging from hooks in the closet at the end of our kitchen for years. The tubes had to be kept clean and dry; they attached to a part that had to be cleaned with white vinegar and boiling water, and the whole apparatus attached to a nebulizer, which we called "the breathing machine." As I put the tubes away, I felt profoundly lucky that we hadn't used it this winter. I breathed a sigh of relief that my children have outgrown their childhood (nonallergic) asthma, and that they now have better resistance to disease.

And then the whole "swine flu" story broke. I try not to be a germaphobe, I really do, but if you've ever had a child who would be up all night coughing every single time the sniffles were going around her school, you might have an idea of how difficult it is to let go of some of those old habits. Mostly we wash our hands now, rather than use antibacterial wipes as we leave a public place, before the youngest one rubs his eye or the older one opens the granola bar she's found beside her seat in the car. Mostly I sleep at night, rather than leaping out of bed thinking I've heard a croupy cough starting up (once it was the bread machine coming on early in the morning; the kneading cycle made a barking sound exactly like a 3-year-old with croup). Mostly I manage not to alarm my children by telling them how risky I think it is for them to touch the handrails of the many flights of stairs at their old elementary school, or to attend a crowded concert downtown in a nearby city. But I decided not to try to hide this week's "swine flu" headlines. It's not just me being an alarmist right now.

This morning the kids told me that they know all about pandemics from playing a video game. The object of the game is to spread the pandemic, they say. The younger one says that he sometimes spends all his "points" on making his disease communicable by various means--air, water, rodents, etc. The older one says that if you want to spread it all over the world, you've got to make it very mild at first, just like a cold, so it gets everywhere, "even Madagascar," before it starts killing people.

But I keep looking at this map of where the flu is, and living on an island seems to be little protection (although it's true there's nothing on Madagascar yet). It makes me think of the title poem from Laura Jensen's volume Bad Boats:

They are like women because they sway.
They are like men because they swagger.
They are like lions because they are king here.
They walk on the sea. The drifting
logs are good: they are taking their punishment.
But the bad boats are ready to be bad,
to overturn in water, to demolish the swagger
and the sway. They are bad boats
because they cannot wind their own rope
or guide themselves neatly close to the wharf.
In their egomania they are glad
for the burden of the storm the men are shirking
when they go for their coffee and yawn.
They are bad boats and they hate their anchors.

My children can mostly wind their own ropes now--they're both teenagers. It's my job to launch them; not to anchor them so securely and for so long that they come to "hate their anchors." I want them to be "glad/for the burden of the storm," because storms can be exciting. Anthropomorphizing a boat is like checking on the progress of the flu across the map, or teaching an almost-sixteen-year-old to drive, in that the person who's watching thinks she's in control. But I'm the one with the imaginary brake. I can stomp my foot all afternoon and produce the same result as if I had been lounging around on the shore doing absolutely nothing.

And now, like Ron, I'm thinking about the Arthur Ransome book We Didn't Mean to Go to Sea. Do you also feel a little bit at sea when you listen to this week's news?

New Pleasures

Last month we took off over the weekend of the kids' spring break and had a fancy dinner and stayed in a hotel. Walker wanted oysters. Ron had to point out the steamed shellfish on the menu and we all had to agree to share the raw oysters as an appetizer before he could be dissuaded from ordering raw oysters as his dinner. A good thing, as it turned out. Although he said he liked the flavor of the one raw oyster he put in his mouth, Walker didn't swallow it. (He did eat all the steamed shellfish happily, as usual.) Ron and Eleanor each tried a raw oyster. Ron ate several. I thought I could just sit there and not be noticed, but it was decided that I needed to try a raw oyster. I sat there thinking of the poem by Roy Blount, Jr.:

I like to eat an uncooked oyster.
Nothing's slicker, nothing's moister.
Nothing's easier on your gorge
Or, when the time comes, to disgorge.
But not to let it too long rest
Within your mouth is always best.
For if your mind dwells on an oyster...
Nothing's slicker, nothing's moister.
I prefer my oyster fried.
Then I'm sure my oyster's died.

Anyway, I put the thing in my mouth and swallowed it. It wasn't too bad. And I'd tried something new.

Just as potent as the pleasure of traveling to a new place and trying a new food is the pleasure of an entirely new book by an author you already like, especially when the author is also fond of the same kind of books you are. With her first book, The Penderwicks, Jeanne Birdsall set out consciously to imitate the pleasures of books by E. Nesbit and Edward Eager. In her new book, The Penderwicks on Gardam Street, she also mentions Eva Ibbotson, Arthur Ransome's Swallows and Amazons series (a BIG favorite at our house*), and a character from Narnia. In addition, she has one of those odd pleasures in store for parents--the pleasure of hearing the words of a story you've read to your child a hundred million times...I couldn't believe how readily the "Scuppers the Sailor Dog" song came back to me when I heard Mr. Penderwick read it to Batty.

Mr. Penderwick's Latin phrases will not be a mystery to any child who's read the Harry Potter series (we have a new game with books--try reversing initial letters to see if you can make words and phrases that make sense, like A Wrinkle in Time becomes A Tinkle in Wrime, Where the Wild Things Are becomes Where the Tiled Wings Are, and any Harry Potter book becomes Perry Hotter and the...). Mr. Penderwick's date with Marianne Dashwood probably will be a mystery for most child readers, at least until the mystery is revealed towards the end of the book. Just a little Toy Story-like pleasure for older readers.

One of my favorite parts of The Penderwicks on Gardam Street is how you can tell that a particular woman would be a bad match for Mr. Penderwick--she not only wears a rabbit coat, but she also has "rabbit fur around the tops of her boots." Shades of Cruella DeVille!

Another favorite part for me is when you see the kitchen of the woman who turn out to be a good match for Mr. Penderwick:

Jane entertained herself by looking around the kitchen. It was nothing like the kitchen at home. It was warm and cozy like home, true, but it was also messy--delightfully so, thought Jane--and it didn't look as though lots of cooking went on there. There was a laptop computer on the counter with duck stickers on it, the spice cabinet was full of Ben's toy trucks, and Jane couldn't spot a cookbook anywhere. This is the kitchen of a Thinker, she decided, and promised herself that she'd never bother with cooking, either.

I have several quite intellectual friends who are good cooks and who enjoy cooking, but I'm not one of them. From now on, I'm going to think of my kitchen as "the kitchen of a Thinker." I can make some good tea sandwiches, and I have a caviar dish with room for ice, so probably I can use it to serve up oysters raw and properly chilled.

*If you want to read the Swallows and Amazons books in order, check out this link:
http://www.amazon.com/Arthur-Ransomes-Swallows-Amazons-order