The Kids Are Alright

We’ve come back into our routines, hurrying and waiting and hustling and eating car snacks and reuniting with old friends and teachers. Familiar and new all at once.

Every year, every September, I spiral a little bit more, worrying about these three turkeys. How will they do in school? Will they have good and real friends who are kind and interesting? Will they learn how to organize their homework and themselves? Will there be bullies at lunchtime?

What will life hold for them! How will they survive in the world when they can’t even remember to bring their lunchbox out the door with them in the morning?? Who will hire them and give them money to do actual, real work? Certainly not Jon, who has once seen the inside of Caleb’s closet and never gone back.

In the midst of it all, every once in a while, we visit the library. Adventures out to favourite and new branches, with different books on their shelves, everyone organizing their stacks between books they plan to borrow, books they’re reviewing for possible borrowing, books that are old friends that just need a visit, tote bags bulging with more books checked out than returned, an impossible mathematical operation.

Visiting the library is like visiting an old friend! How I missed you and your abundant and musty books! I release my children among your fold like a dog walker finally arriving at the dog park. The familiar smells and shelves of books organized and categorized so nicely, and where you can pull as many books out as possible, with just the faintest whiff of interest or curiosity, and bring them to some quiet or cozy corner and disappear from the world for a minute. Naomi has reached the stage of encroaching into some of the worlds previously Caleb had explored on his own, and he is aghast and confounded and agog at this unexpected company in his favourite stories. In the car, Caleb captive and strapped in, Naomi keen to discuss dragon eggs and prophecies, Caleb reluctant to engage and yet cannot resist being pulled into a discussion. No! He shouts. It was not broken, it was cracked! Ugh!

What a magic act that is, to disappear from one world into another, to step in through some shimmering portal into someone else’s kitchen or misspelled police station or a previous or future era. No matter what else is going on, no matter the lunchroom bullies or looming tax payments or dental visits or impossible life choices, there is always that miracle of words on paper.

Occasionally I reread aloud stories from my own youth with the kids, and I’m always a bit nervous about how well they’ll have aged, what the kids will think of this or that part of it, if they’ll appreciate it the same way I did, if these books will mean to them what they meant to me. And of course they won’t! Each story and character is different for everyone, even when you read it aloud together. It’s part of the magic, they say.

In any case, books are everywhere, a danger on the stairs, Jon taking photos of the growing mountain in the living room, hardcovers wedged uncomfortably under pillows, lined up along the car dashboard, baking in the sun.

But alas it is not the real world, the one in which we live, in which we get to squeeze the ones that we love the most, feel the wind on our faces, and eat the midnight chocolate. Books are books, and life is life. I must (must I?) pull myself together and pull my head out of my books and the sand and tilt at windmills some more.

And yet, in this real world, along with the books, conjured by the books, a bit of magic floats along when you look up from the pages.