INTRODUCTION
by Amy Ehrlich
IN THE BLINK OF AN EYE
by Norma Fox Mazer
FOOD FROM THE OUTSIDE
by Rita Williams-Garcia
INTERVIEW WITH A SHRIMP
by Paul Fleischman
THE LONG CLOSET
by Jane Yolen
HOW I LOST MY STATION IN LIFE
by E. L. Konigsburg
BUS PROBLEMS
by Howard Norman
PEGASUS FOR A SUMMER
by Michael J. Rosen
LEARNING TO SWIM
by Kyoko Mori
WAITING FOR MIDNIGHT
by Karen Hesse
THE SNAPPING TURTLE
by Joseph Bruchac
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHIES
When I Was Your Age, Volume Two has given me the great pleasure of editing a second group of stories by children’s authors about growing up. I’ve now worked on twenty of these — twenty stories about twenty childhoods, twenty different ways of seeing and being in the world.
It stands to reason that every single person is unique, but when you ask twenty authors the same question: “What was it like when you were a child?” and get answers that are so wildly different in content and tone, it makes you look at other people in amazement. How have we come to be together? How do we even manage to communicate?
But the ten stories in When I Was Your Age, Volume Two (and those in the first volume as well) chart a clear and certain path through the forest of human differences. It is simply this: we are all different, we are all human, and if we tell the truth, we will be understood.
The authors in this collection have been honest and generous. They have shown us how they’ve managed not only to survive their childhoods but to treasure and even to laugh at them. If you read the notes at the end of each story, I think you will see an almost seamless connection between the authors’ stories and the rest of their lives. These people — these children who grew up to be authors — write because they need to. By exploring the past with words, they can give form and meaning to their own experiences.
And what are these experiences? I think I can tell you a bit about each story without giving too much away. Rather than attempting to analyze anything, I’d rather tell you what I most love about each author’s writing. That way, I’ll be able to enjoy it all over again, and perhaps you will too.
Norma Fox Mazer’s “In the Blink of an Eye” pulls us right into her world. Here is Norma, vivid from the very first sentence, all her nerves jangling: “In the gutter, a lit cigarette butt catches my eye. I swoop for it, stick it in my mouth, and take a puff. It tastes like dirty straw; still, I suck deeply, as I’ve seen my father do.” Outside in the street Norma is tough, a tomboy, but at home she can’t seem to stop crying. “There goes the faucet,” her family say. “She’s so sensitive . . . too sensitive.” How lucky though for the rest of us that she was! It must be because Norma feels things so deeply that her writing is so full of feeling.
Rita Williams-Garcia, as we meet her in “Food from the Outside,” is another case entirely. Her response to life is not to cry about it but to take action. Laughter, nerve, jive, and guile are how Rita, her brother, and her sister get around their strict, opinionated mother’s rule never to eat at anyone else’s house. Rita explains it with a comic’s deadpan timing: “You see, our mother, known throughout the neighborhood as ‘Miss Essie,’ was still refining her cooking skills.” The children’s elaborate efforts to outsmart Miss Essie make their lives seem more fun and eventful than the situation comedies they watch on TV.
Paul Fleischman had no such obstacles to contend with. As he himself admits, “I lived in comfortable circumstances in beautiful Santa Monica, California, ten blocks from the beach, amid a loving family, in a time of peace . . .” But “all that meant nothing.” Why? Because “throughout his school years he suffered from CSD, Chronic Stature Deficiency. Paul Fleischman was a ‘shrimp.’”
I’m quoting from Paul’s introduction to his story, “Interview with a Shrimp,” which is set up in a journalistic question-and-answer format. To me, the fact that Paul has chosen such an approach to writing about his childhood confirms one effect of his shortness. Having a special vantage point, being different, helped to make him an original thinker — and eventually a writer.
Paul’s story is also unusual in providing an overview of an entire childhood. Most of the stories in the book focus on a single dramatic incident, perhaps because that’s the way experience is imprinted in our minds. Things that were upsetting or unresolved at the time stay with us.
Jane Yolen’s “The Long Closet” is just such a memory — it begins with a mystery and ends with a terrible discovery. One night when she is sleeping in her grandparents’ house in Virginia, an insistent, sighing sound wakes her. In this story — a tale of suspense, really — we are with Jane every moment, afraid to find out what the sound is, yet pulled forward by it. Everything is described with nerve-racking slowness. “The room was filled with that lovely, scary early morning half-light you get in the South; shadows of the tall pines seemed to creep around and about the wainscoting on the walls. The sound came again, and I realized it was coming from the long closet.”
How does a writer re-create the past and give it over to us fresh and new and shining in the present moment? I think detail of the senses — what is seen, heard, smelled, felt — is the only answer. Draw a picture in words and make it real. This is just what Howard Norman does in “Bus Problems,” when he describes the bookmobile in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where he worked every weekday in the summer of 1959.
We know just by the quality of Howard’s writing — and also because he does tell us so — that for him the bookmobile was an enchanted world, “a secure and peaceful place.” We can see the leather benches mended with masking tape, and feel the heat of the day outside. It’s as if the story has opened on an empty but familiar stage, then suddenly onto it leap the most amazing characters, and the drama begins.
If a child is lucky, there is always shelter, a place that is yours alone. For Michael J. Rosen, that place was on the back of a horse. “I’d climb in the saddle, and instantly, other riders, other horses in the ring, whatever it was I didn’t want to do after camp or beginning in September . . . it all ceased to exist, along with the rest of my life on the ground, shrinking, fading behind the trail of dust the horse and I made heading to the horizon.”
What I most appreciate though about Michael’s story “Pegasus for a Summer” is the vulnerability and longing it conveys. He bravely wears his heart on his sleeve, letting us see so clearly his need for approval, for love.
All children certainly need these things, and the degree to which they get them, or don’t, depends on their families. But children can sometimes be wrong about how their families feel about them, as E. L. Konigsburg wryly demonstrates in “How I Lost My Station in Life.” There were two daughters in the family, Elaine (E. L.) and her sister Harriett, and it seems that Elaine’s role was (1) to be the baby of the family and (2) to get all As in school. Everything was going along fine until (1) they moved in with relatives who had a child younger than she was and (2) she had to go to a new school, where the teacher “. . . asked the wrong questions for the answers I gave.”
Behind the specifics of Elaine’s plight is a bright child’s need to do well — so that others will love her and also for its own sake. It is this latter aspect that can serve us, once we learn it, for our entire lives.
So many of the stories in the collection appear to be about achievement but aren’t really. In Kyoko Mori’s nearly bottomless “Learning to Swim” we easily und
erstand her desire to please her wonderful mother by earning red or black lines on her bathing cap — each representing a certain number of meters swum in the school pool. The events in the story take place in Japan and there is a controlled, matter-of-fact tone to the writing that seems a part of this distant culture, yet we can still see in each speech and gesture all that her mother does for Kyoko and how deeply she is loved.
But what if a child’s parents for some reason don’t make the child feel loved? In that case, something truly amazing can still happen, as it does in Karen Hesse’s “Waiting for Midnight.” Unable to sleep at night, haunted by fears and her next-door neighbor’s secrets, Karen turns to prayer. She witnesses what seems to be a miracle, and yet to me the real miracle is her own resourcefulness and the heartbreaking beauty of her imagination.
In “The Snapping Turtle” by Joseph Bruchac, beauty is outside and all around him. This is a story about nature, about a young boy’s everyday intimacy with the world of plants and animals. Joe’s grandparents, who raised him, gave him a good balance of things: his grandmother loved books and reading, and his grandfather schooled him in the ways of the forest and streams.
When he catches a snapping turtle one day while fishing for trout, his grandparents’ response to his dilemma of what to do with the turtle makes it clear just how lucky he is in them: “My grandmother . . . looked at me. So did Grampa. It was wonderful how they could focus their attention on me in a way that made me feel they were ready to do whatever they could to help.”
This response — to pay attention in a deep and careful way — is something that Joseph Bruchac and the other writers in this collection all seem to have learned as children. Their way of noting the details in a single moment and of feeling the pain and comedy and wonder of things are gifts to us.
As we read the stories, both moved and entertained, we may also be consoled. A girl who can’t stop crying, three nervy kids in an African American family, a short boy growing up in California, a girl suddenly awakened in her grandparents’ house, a midwestern boy with his first summer job, an elementary school scholar in the 1930s, a boy who loves horseback riding, a Japanese girl adrift, a lonely girl in Baltimore, a boy who is most at home outdoors — surely we recognize these children.
Surely they are like us after all.
— AMY EHRLICH
I. Cigarette Butt
In the gutter, a lit cigarette butt catches my eye. I swoop for it, stick it in my mouth, and take a puff. It tastes like dirty straw; still, I suck deeply, as I’ve seen my father do. I choke and cough, and my eyes stream tears, as they so often do at home, but these are OK tears, the kind you get from doing something forbidden and tough. My mother hates smoking. She says it’s a filthy habit; she calls cigarettes coffin nails, and every time my father lights up, she says, “Oh, Mike!” My sisters and I think she’s prejudiced about cigarettes and wish that she’d leave my father alone.
My sisters are Adele and Linda. We all have modern names, American names, interesting names. My mother’s name used to be Zlatckey. You can’t even say a name like that. Zlatckey! That was her name when she came to this country as a tiny girl with her parents and brothers. Then Zlatckey became Slats, but that was almost as bad, so she picked a new name, Jenny. That became Jeannie and then, in time, Jean. An OK name. It goes with my father’s name, Michael, which is the best name in our family.
I let the butt drag from a corner of my mouth, the way my father does. Humphrey Bogart, the movie star, does the same thing. I think my dad looks a little like Humphrey, and they can both talk with the cigarette hanging from their lower lip. “How do you do?” I say, jutting my chin to keep the cigarette butt stuck on my lip. “My name is Norm — ”
The butt slides off my lip and lands in the gutter again. Just as I bend down to retrieve it, I have a thought that makes my stomach jump. What if, behind one of the windows of one of the houses on this street, which is First Street in Glens Falls, New York, someone is watching me? And what if this someone, who is probably another mother, tells my mother she saw me smoking — and smoking not just a cigarette, but a cigarette butt that I picked up not just from the sidewalk, but from the gutter? The filthy gutter.
I walk away fast, humming and looking around brightly, as if I don’t even know what the word cigarette means. But my breath is hot and stinky, a dead giveaway. I fan my mouth over and over. Then, from the other end of the street, I hear my sister calling me to supper. “Norma,” she yells, “Normaaaa!” She’s six years older than me and thinks she’s my other mother. I’m not ready to answer and dawdle past Bud the Bicycle Man’s repair shop. It’s really just another little single-family house, with a sagging porch jammed with bicycles and bicycle parts. Inside, more bicycles hang from the walls and the ceiling. And there’s Bud, with his grease-smeared overalls, who never says anything except “Ay-yuh” when you ask him to fix the chain on your bike or raise the seat.
Two doors down is the candy store, which is also a house with the store in front where the living room is supposed to be. I check all my pockets on the off chance that there’s a penny that I missed spending. Two sisters with rolled gray hair own the store. They stand so perfectly straight behind the counter that I think maybe they sleep like that, ready in an instant to open their eyes and sell the next customer a Tootsie Roll or six gumdrops.
“Nor-maaa . . . Norma Fox!” In the authoritative slap of my sister’s voice, I hear the bad news that she might already know that I’ve been — smoking. She has a way of intuiting things like that. And now it’s not just my smelly cigarette breath that’s hot, but my whole face.
II. The Street
“Your sister’s calling you,” someone says behind me.
It’s Herbie Sternfeld, giving me one of his strange grins that seems to involve only half his face.
Herbie, his parents, and their shaggy St. Bernard live downstairs from us. They’re our landlords, and my mother says I have to be polite to them. It’s not hard to be polite to Herbie’s parents. I like them. Being polite to Herbie is different, though. I don’t know if I don’t like him, or if I’m just scared of him. I don’t know if I’m scared of him because he is scary or because he’s weird.
It’s not just his double-thick glasses or his awkward, neck-forward walk, or even his stiff black hair that looks like cartoon hair that somebody shot electricity through. It’s the way he talks in a loud, uninflected voice, and how he spends his time, doing experiments with chemicals in the shed behind the Sternfelds’ kitchen. And it’s how sometimes he looks at you and says hello, but sometimes he looks at you and yells at you to get away, and sometimes, the worst, he flashes his eyes.
I hate it when he flashes his eyes. They’re big and round and black, and they dart around and hardly ever seem to look straight at you, but then suddenly they’ll light up and do that flashing thing, as if he’s sending an important message. A vital message. A message you better get.
I’m surprised to see Herbie on the street. Sometimes he sits on the front porch and yells at people passing by, but he hardly ever goes out. Me, I’m always outside, playing every minute I can. Like all the other kids, I race through backyards at dusk playing hide-and-seek, listening for the call of “Alleee alleee infree!” I climb the crab apple tree on the side of our house to eat the sour, wrinkled little fruits, and I roller-skate and bike everywhere. I jump rope and play ball with the girls, and marbles with the boys, crooking my thumb and crowing when one of the dark no-nonsense shooties hits the mark.
“I’m going to the store,” Herbie says. Shouts, really. “Getting bread for my mother. You like that white bread, huh, Fox girl?”
It’s true I like the mushy, store-bought white bread the Sternfelds eat, the kind of bread my mother won’t allow in our house because, she says, it isn’t healthy. I know she must be right, but I also know how good mushy, store-bought white bread tastes, because I’ve eaten it, taken it right from Herbie’s sweaty hand. I only did it once, but I also read one of Herbie�
�s comics at the same time, which makes two bad things I did simultaneously. We don’t read comics in our house, either.
“Norma!” my sister calls again briskly. “Norma Fox! Normaaa! Supp-er!”
“Com-ing!” I call back, but I don’t move. Herbie’s staring at me: it’s almost an eye flash, and maybe that’s the reason I tell him I’ve been smoking. To distract him. To fend off that eye flash.
“Smoking?” he says in his loud voice. “You have not.”
“I have!” I say, and with two fingers next to my mouth I demonstrate how I held the cigarette just like a movie hero.
Herbie peers at me through his thick glasses, as if I’m one of his experiments. “Dirty liar,” he says.
My cheeks go hot. This is almost the worst insult anyone can give me. I lean into his face. “Huuuuh!” I breathe, and blow hot cigarette breath at him. “Huuuuh!”
He reels back as if I’ve shot him, one shoulder up defensively, then gives me a hard shove, sending me back against a tree. I hit my head, and it hurts! I want to cry, but I can’t, because I’m outside. “You dumb sissy,” I choke.
Herbie makes an ugly grimace and walks away. Maybe he didn’t hear what I said. I cross fingers on both hands and run the rest of the way home, holding back the tears.
III. The Faucet
In the house, in my family, I cry a lot. I get my feelings hurt all the time. I cry if someone says something mean to me. I cry when I hear a sad story. When dirty Billy Miner knocks me down in the snow, falls on top of me, and shoves his lips on mine, I cry — but not outside. I wait until I get home. Then I cry agonies of humiliation. I cry when I lose my turquoise ring. I even cry — but only at home — if I don’t get a good mark on a test.
Nobody likes my crying. “She cries at the drop of a hat,” they say. “There she goes again. . . . Here come the waterworks. . . . Turn off the faucet, somebody!” Just seeing my eyes fill and my face get set to crumple is enough to bring on exasperated sighs. Sometimes I’m almost like two different people, the tomboy outside my house and the crybaby inside.
When I Was Your Age, Volume Two Page 1