Findings

I just think Arnold Lobel is a dear man. That’s a mushier evaluation than I usually give, but I can’t help it. His birthday is this month, and I chose him for the Celebrate the Author Challenge. He’s an author I enjoyed as a child myself, and now again with my children.

If you’ve ever read the Frog and Toad stories, maybe you know what I mean. What a pair these two old bachelors are! So complementary in their personalities. So physically unattractive (unless you have a thing for amphibians, as I admittedly did in first grade). So… human.

In our house, “I’m having a Toad kind of a day” has become part of our specialized family discourse. When you wake up feeling a bit grumpy, stodgy, easily panicked, and inflexible, you’re having a Toad day. Toad somehow stays lovable in the stories despite this. Perhaps it’s because Lobel has balanced him so perfectly with his tall green friend Frog, who’s almost always cheerful, fun-loving, loyal, and encouraging.

My favorite stories come from Frog and Toad Together. I love “Cookies,” for instance, because it’s so darn true. Fresh-baked cookies have always been my Waterloo, the demands of willpower notwithstanding, so I can relate to these guys when they can’t resist some cookies Toad has baked, and resort to all kind of foolish attempts to trick themselves into not eating any more. And then there’s “Dragons and Giants,” where they read a story together and then go looking for adventure to prove their mettle. The story ends with them back home, safe, but hiding. Are they brave? What makes a person (or a small squishy animal) brave?

I could talk about every single story in the book. I like them all. But the most complex is “The Dream.” Toad dreams that he’s onstage, with Frog his only audience, and a booming voice announcing his many accomplishments. The applause is deafening, but with each succeeding performance, Frog shrinks until Toad can no longer find him. It’s a story about the costs of competetiveness, told feelingly, compellingly, and memorably. It’s a wonderful find for children.

This audiobook is one we own, and I recommend it. Arnold Lobel himself is the reader, and he has the most warm, friendly voice. It’s perfect for these stories, all of which convey a gentle wisdom fleshed out in true-to-life relationships and situations. My only regret is that my daughters have listened to it so much, they have the stories memorized and can no longer benefit from these books as readers. But no matter. I’ll take them on any terms.

This book has been on my shelf for years, but though I’ve read pieces of it (my tagline comes from it), never before this week have I sat down and read it all the way through. It’s an autobiography of Eudora Welty’s writerly persona, but this doesn’t mean it’s a dry, theoretical treatise. Far from it. She explores her family history, complete with photographs and early childhood memories recounted with wonderful clarity of detail. It’s a short book, organized simply into three sections: “Listening,” “Learning to See,” and “Finding a Voice.”

I’ve only read one of Welty’s novels, The Optimist’s Daughter, and both my great liking for it and its alleged autobiographical nature compelled me to pick up One Writer’s Beginnings. The two books truly do bear a close resemblance to each other. I find it interesting that Welty quotes a passage from Optimist in the concluding pages of this book. Apparently she wrote Optimist first, and in One Writer’s Beginnings she’s following in the footsteps of the heroine of that story, Laurel Hand. I love the idea of a writer who’s inspired by her characters, rather than always implanting her own already-lived experience into them.

The commonalities between the two books are many and substantial. The characters, the locales, the events, and even the central, organizing situation of a woman returning to explore her family’s past are identical. I was glad that along with other aspects of writing and the genesis of stories, Welty touches on character creation, a discussion that’s invariably provocative and discerning. On the subject of her own autobiographical explorations she has this to say:

Through learning at my later date things I hadn’t known, or had escaped or possibly feared realizing, about my parents — and myself — I glimpse our whole family life as if it were freed of that clock time which spaces us apart so inhibitingly, divides young and old, keeps our living through the same experiences at separate distances.

It is our inward journey that leads us through time — forward or back, seldom in a straight line, most often spiraling. Each of us is moving, changing, with respect to others. As we discover, we remember; remembering, we discover; and most intensely do we experience this when our separate journeys converge. Our living experience at those meeting points is one of the charged dramatic fields of fiction.

These fascinations with time, different kinds of time, overlapping experience, and the function of memory, run through both this story and Optimist. Welty’s ideas about a transcending ”confluence” of experience are what give her exploration of the past meaning, and resolve the story. Through memory, we can reach into the past and access the truths of our own “beginnings.” What Welty wasn’t aware of as a child, she can uncover in this book, writing in her seventies, through memory. Her perspective reminds me very much of Wendell Berry’s, which surfaces over and over in his stories and poems, and includes like Welty’s not just the importance of memory, but the equally important tempering influences of faith and love.

This all sounds very abstract, so I’ll conclude by handing the microphone back to Welty herself as she links art and life and memory far more succinctly than I seem able to do:

It seems to me, writing of my parents now in my seventies, that I see continuities in their lives that weren’t visible to me when they were living… Could it be that I can better see their lives — or any lives I know — today because I’m a fiction writer? See them not as fiction, certainly — see them, perhaps, as even greater mysteries than I knew. Writing fiction has developed in me an abiding respect for the unknown in a human lifetime and a sense of where to look for the threads, how to follow, how to connect, find in the thick of the tangle what clear line persists. The strands are all there: to the memory nothing is ever really lost.