Did the author write this book just for me?

September field, Leelanau County

Ah, September! It can really break your heart, can’t it? And so can books, even – maybe especially – the ones we love most. 

 

In my high school French classes, every year the teacher (different teacher, different years) urged us to read The Little Prince. It was like English teachers urging us to read (actually, this latter book was assigned reading, and I still skipped it) The Red Badge of Courage, but I was the quiet rebel in the back of the room, resisting what seemed like such common coin. If everyone read it, I didn’t want to. I wanted to discover my own books, thank you very much! Eventually, years later, I finally picked up The Little Prince and couldn’t believe I’d denied myself such an exquisite gift for so long. 

 

Sometimes I called my late husband, the Artist, “the little prince.” He was an only child, after all, adored and indulged by his doting mother, who was quite thoroughly “wrapped around his little finger,” as the old, trite saying goes. The youngest in his generation of cousins, many of whom were already teenagers when he was born, he was doted upon by those girls, too. Their real, live little doll! He learned quickly that charm was a winning formula, as in the church pageant when he had failed to learn his Bible verse and stood on stage grinning and twirling his new tie and saying to the congregation (instead of the assigned Bible verse), “See what I got for Christmas?” They loved it! So I would tell him that he was “the little prince” or, alternatively, “Fate’s little darling.” Not that the life of my Artist or any artist is ever be financially easy, but he knew what really mattered, and he drew love to him, always. His gift for friendship and for conversations on important topics (see again The Little Prince) made him unforgettable.

 

Last winter in our mountain cabin, I handed David an English translation of the St.-Exupéry classic, and he had time to read enough of the first few pages, before another hospital trip intervened, so he could understand why I thought he was that little prince, as well as a little prince – and why I had felt like that little prince myself reading it and why he and I were so drawn to each other and so happy together. The pilot gave up his dream of becoming a painter, but the Artist never did, despite countless material sacrifices necessary to gain the dream's reality. But a drive from Kalamazoo to Galesburg for thrift shopping and coffee with him was, I told one of his friends years ago, more wonderful, I'm sure, than some people's trips to Paris: Our conversations could be adventures in themselves.

Conversations – about things that mattered! And that laughter! I have stars that laugh!

Whenever I said "asters," he would say, "Lady Astor's horse."

When Lynne Rae Perkins’s book about squirrels having adventures was published, the Artist was amused to hear me recommending it to adults until one day he happened into the bookstore while I was reading aloud from Nuts to You! “Is that the squirrel story you were talking about?” he asked. Of course he got it! Can you think for a moment that he wouldn't have?

 

No wonder, then, that I would think of him while reading Violet & Jobie in the Wild. (Actually, it’s no wonder that I think of him whatever I do, is it?) What I didn’t expect were all the accumulating passages and similarities in Violet’s story and mine the further I got into the story. I'll share just three with you.

 

When Zolian recounts to Violet his flight in the owl’s talons, immediately I thought of the Artist’s flight by helicopter from Willcox, Arizona, to a larger hospital in the Phoenix area. He said of that flight, still thrilled the next day, “It was transcendent!” and when I think of it now, I think, He had that -- and loved it!

 

Zolian wanted to see once again the morning flight of sandhill cranes. The Artist and I went many times to Whitewater Draw in Cochise County, Arizona, or, closer to our winter ghost town cabin, to Twin Lakes outside Willcox to see sandhill cranes in flight. You hear them long before you see them, and they circle for ages, it seems, high in the sky, only gradually coming to water and earth. The cranes were always transporting to hear and see.

Then on one page came the words (I could scarcely believe it) “Easy peasy”! 

Our little Peasy

There was more, but….

 

Disclaimer: This is not a book review. In case you have not already figured it out, I cannot be objective about a book that touches me so very deeply and seems so personally directed at the deepest moments of my own life. But that has always been the wonder of the best children’s books! 

Doesn’t every girl who ever read Little Women feel that she is Jo March? Doesn’t every boy or girl reading The Black Stallion inhabit the character of Alec, befriending that magnificent horse on the island? Children a hundred years ago, hearing the story of “Hansel & Gretel,” must have imagined themselves surviving in the woods and narrowly escaping a hideous fate and then, thanks to the story and their own imaginations, taken courage for whatever was frightening in their own lives. 

That’s it, you see. We escape into stories, and the best don’t take us away from life but deeper into it. “Real life,” says Zolian in Violet & Jobie. “What other kind is there?” 

 

I hope all readers, of whatever age, who read Violet & Jobie in the Wild feel that the story was written just for them. Lynne Rae Perkins has made magic here once again for us all. Even tears can be good....

"The world: it really is such a beautiful place."

 

P.S. Please do not overlook the other new September book gifts from Leelanau County authors. More about these sometime in the future, I promise. 

P.P.S. And Sunny Juliet -- just because --

Who is the little prince, who the pilot, the fox, the rose?

Roses are not rare on earth. No investor would assign to any rose a value of its weight in gold, however heavy with dew the petals. If you know the story of The Little Prince, the classic tale of imagination by French pilot and writer Antoine de Saint Exupéry, you will recall the little prince’s disappointment when he discovers how common roses are here and realizes that his rose, back on his tiny planet, is not one of a kind, after all. He had cared for her so tenderly, believing her unique au monde, as she had assured him she was. 

 

It is the fox, who begs to be tamed (which is, he explains, to have ties established, for instance between himself and the boy), who teaches the little prince the inestimable value of relationship.

 

“…To me, you are still nothing more than a little boy who is just like a hundred thousand other little boys. And I have no need of you. And you, on your part, have no need of me. To you, I am nothing more than a fox like a hundred thousand other foxes. But if you tame me, then we shall need each other. To me, you will be unique in all the world. To you, I shall be unique in all the world….”

 

“I am beginning to understand,” said the little prince. “There is a flower … I think she has tamed me….”

 

But there comes a time when the fox and the boy must part, and as the fox is overcome with sadness the boy thinks their friendship has done the fox no good at all. The fox tells him otherwise and explains why. -- But for those of you who have not yet read this book, I leave the sweetly poignant details for you to discover on your own. 

 

Did the flower tame the boy who then tamed the fox and also the pilot? As I read this book once again, I can’t help thinking of our Peasy. Did we tame him, or did he tame us? Was the Artist in the beginning the pilot, only later on to become a fox to the little prince? Or was Peasy the rose to the Artist and me? Or was Peasy the little prince, come to earth to be with us for a while and teach us about love even as he was learning? 

 

I see my little Pea in the rose, deluded in thinking himself so strongly defended against the world’s dangers. I see him also in the little prince, so concerned to protect the Artist and me, his roses. 

 

I see our Peasy in the fox,  eager to have us tame him and create ties to bind the three of us together. How happy and grateful he was to have a home and family! And I see the Artist and myself in all these different roles and also in the role of the pilot. 

 

Did we “waste” a year of our life on a dog like a hundred thousand other nameless dogs needing rescue? ‘Waste’ is the English word Katherine Woods uses in her translation: 

 

“It is the time you have wasted for your rose that makes her so important.” 

 

The original French reads somewhat differently:

 

“C’est le temps que tu as perdu pour ta rose qui fait ta rose si importante.”

 

“The time you have lost….”

We human beings lose time every day. Whether we feel we have been “productive” or “creative” or that we have “wasted” twenty-four hours, yesterday is gone, and there is no turning back. Yet as Proust discovered in his final volume, Time Regained, the past continues with us in memory. And just as there is no love created, no relationship forged, no friendship made, without taking time for it, spending time on it, losing time for it, so too love lives on in memories forged by time.

 

I suppose there are some among you, reading this, who think I have spent, wasted, lost quite enough time and words dwelling on my little lost boy. The Artist and I are fortunate in having each other – for many, many reasons, but one these days is being able to talk to each other about the dog we loved and couldn’t keep. Because no one else can ever fully understand why we miss him as much as we do. Only the two of us knew “the essential” loving heart of Peasy. 

 

And now we are the pilot, left behind and remembering, missing him, but the world is richer for us in all the ways that call our boy to mind again and again. 

Toujours dans nos âmes