A Taste for Books

“Then old Mrs. Rabbit took a basket and her umbrella and went through the wood to the baker’s. She bought a loaf of bread and five currant buns.”

This is a line from one of my favorite books, “The Tale of Peter Rabbit,” and I can’t help but quote it to myself, or to anyone who cares to listen, every time I bake a batch of sourdough rye currant buns.

During my very brief career as a high school English teacher, I was advised by a veteran teacher that any assigned project would gain students’ cooperation and maybe even excitement so long as food was involved.

That bit of advice comes back to me as I sort through the nearly-empty bedrooms of my grown children and an attic of clutter that includes boxes and bags of children’s books. The great number of food-themed books is suddenly before me – “The Gingerbread Boy,” “Stone Soup,” “Jamie O’Rourke and The Big Potato,” “Rain Makes Applesauce” – to name a few. The entire “Strega Nona” series by Tomie dePaola seems to be based on the love of pasta and bread – and the term “never ending pasta pot” and the baking of an Italian panettone at Christmastime have become both a friendly phrase and an annual tradition in our house because of his books. Some book purchases were made after my children were grown, such as the complete collection of Winnie the Pooh tales – whose enduring quest can be boiled down to two things: honey and friendship. That veteran teacher was right – children (of all ages) have a natural affinity for food.

As a parent, I particularly enjoyed quoting a guilt-instilling passage from my personal favorite, “The Little Red Hen.” This is about a hardworking hen who lives with others who enjoy the fruits of her efforts but none of the hard work. This is what she says, a quote I have memorized from repeated usage: “’All by myself I planted the wheat, I cut the wheat, I took the wheat to the mill to be ground into flour. All by myself I gathered the sticks, I built the fire, I mixed the cake. And all by myself I am going to eat it!’ And so she did, to the very last crumb.”

All children are prone to eating too much of a good thing – as is Peter Rabbit who got carried away in Mr. McGregor’s garden by all the tempting radishes, lettuce, French beans . . . “And feeling rather sick, he went to look for some parsley.” At nighttime, he was put to bed by his mother and given a tablespoon of chamomile tea – “But Flopsy, Mopsy, and Cottontail had bread and milk and blackberries for supper.”  I enjoyed quoting this when one child felt sick (or had tonsils out) and couldn't eat dinner.

“Children are the best readers of genuine literature,” says Isaac Bashevis Singer, one of my favorite writers of both children’s and adult literatures -- categories he frequently blurs or ignores according to his publisher. Singer continues, “The child is still the independent reader who relies on nothing but his own taste (my italics).  Names and authorities mean nothing to him. Long after literature for adults has gone to pieces, books for children will constitute the last vestige of storytelling, logic, faith in the family, in God, and in real humanism . . . "

My children are technically grown, and these tattered childhood books have one by one been moved from the attic and bedrooms to my own personal library – and some, to their rightful place in the kitchen. I have never stopped loving them. I find myself quoting those timeless classics much as a scholar might quote Blake or Keats – if only to myself as I bake the traditional panettone or the occasional batch of currant buns, always to be enjoyed alongside a cup of tea.

Some Mother's Bird

The baby bluebirds are eating on their own today, not perched on the feeder helplessly waiting for mother or father to place food in their mouths – though if a parent shows up they will suspiciously open needy beaks to let out infantile squeals of helplessness as though they’d been left to starve – it’s easier that way, they might think. Their mother must be watching them from high branches, observing as they feed themselves like grown-ups, before she comes down to share the feeder with them as equals – for she is hungry too. That’s when her babies remind her, we shall never be equals; you shall always be our mother.

I saw her, the mother, look at one of these splotchy blue fledglings at the birdfeeder the other day – the same old response came from the baby – that is, an open, begging beak – and she perched herself face to face against this fledgling as though sitting him down for a lesson. She braced her body – and how can I say I saw this, a bracing? She looked stiff, astute, statue-like, and she stared straight into the open beak of the bird. She leaned slightly forward as though readying herself to make an attack – and against her own baby! She held the most statue-like presence of an angry bird that I had ever seen. The baby, clueless and impervious – for this mother had always been kind – kept opening its beak and squealing – didn’t you hear me, mother? Won’t you feed me? Why are you acting that way? But mother remained resolute . . .

This is the same mother who, along with her mate, had worked tirelessly to hatch and feed babies all through June. Each morning mother and father seemed to anticipate my emergence from the front door to put out a few tablespoons of store-bought worms to supplement the diet of their growing family in the birdhouse out back. She must have been watching me from above, for before I could get back into the house to look out the kitchen window, she and her mate would be working in tandem to peck up as many wiggly things into their beaks as possible for delivery to their little house out back. They’d work one at the feeder, one at the birdhouse, back and forth, till all the harvesting was done – and I would run from kitchen window to back room window, trying to keep pace with each, but sometimes missing one or the other along the way. Humorously, I’d catch the male bird lingering at the feeder to sample a few tasty treats for himself before filling his beak for the family – why not? – while mother bird never showed anything but drive in her eyes – the drive to satisfy the hunger of noisy babies. I’ve seen that look before. I understand now why Disney chose merry bluebirds to ready Cinderella for the ball – to sew her dress, tie her bows, and carry her train – for they are active, hardworking, vigilant, and driven birds.

Once I saw a noisome squirrel – they’re all noisome – get too close to the hatchlings’ house, and out of nowhere came diving a sapphire male bluebird toward the squirrel’s head. As soon as the squirrel went running, this furious bluebird chased him across the backyard while flying not four inches from the ground.

Flying lessons began over Fourth of July weekend – watchful parents sat perched in high branches while their twin fledglings made awkward hops and leaps into the unknown, at one time landing like dropped eggs onto this back doorstep where they looked up to me for guidance as to what should be done next. I had already seen what happened to that noisome squirrel, so I kept my distance other than to click a few photos – they grow up so fast . . .

But that was June . . . then the Holiday . . . and now, mid-July, this mother holds firm at feeding time. Unmoved by the gaping mouth, I saw her make one straight pecking attack at her baby’s open beak. She did not touch the young bird, but I think had calculated the move only to make her point – I will not be feeding you again.

The baby bird did not pull back, was not afraid of the simulated attack, and did not flinch a feather. Then the mother flew away, having stated her purpose firmly. She didn’t feed her baby – but interestingly, she also didn’t partake of the worms I had put out to feed the whole family. She had shown her fledglings this easy hunting ground; she would find her own food elsewhere.

I saw her come back later after the babies had had their fill and flown away to some higher branches. She came up to the feeder alone, hopped around to look full circle for her fledglings – realizing, I think, that she was alone at last – then poked around half-heartedly into the leftover meal to see if any worms had been left for her. None!  I think that made her happy. She stayed perched there a few minutes longer – her stature relaxed now, the drive gone from her eyes, the readiness gone from her wings. She looked out over a world still waiting for her. In all of June, I had never seen her rest upon the feeder so contentedly.

Dreams of our mothers
Lived in younger hosts;
A safe passage, is all for now
She prays.

Canful of Pens

I have so many stray pens strewn through the house and in my purse from places I have been, businesses I have frequented – some I have not . . . there is one which recurrently comes into my hand from a place I have not been – “Studley Chiropractic Clinic.” That’s the inscription on just one of a can full of pens I poured into a box of miscellanea to bring home with me when my sister and I cleaned out my mother’s house after her death. The can of pens was on the hutch cabinet near the phone – a large soup can that she had covered with a yellow-and-orange floral design contact paper. She began to stand pens in the can, one at a time – I imagine – as she was given them over many years from such places as the chiropractor’s or dentist’s or doctor’s offices where she went; from the hardware store, bank, pharmacy, or hearing aid center – the trail left by a widow who had learned to take care of herself.


Some of the pens must have been mailed to my mother from Medicare, for they tout advertisements for drugs that I’m sure she never took – Lexipro, Namenda, Maxalt-MLT. She was noted for curing all ills with an aspirin and a good nap, though in later years I suspect she let a prescription-trigger-happy doctor make those choices for her – this will help, he most likely said too often. Maybe her pharmacist put one such pen in each bag of refilled prescription – another pen – and she placed the pen upright in the tin can by the phone.

It’s been more than a year since I spilled the can of pens into the box and brought them home with me and placed them in a small clay pot near my own phone. And in this past year many of those pens have been pitched, one by one, into the large trash can – that is, if they didn’t work when I needed them to. I’m always careful to read the pen just one last time to see what piece of the trail just ended.

That’s why most of my mother’s pens are gone now. Only a dozen or 15 remain, like this one that keeps coming into my hand from Studley Chiropractic Clinic. She must have gone there a lot – and he often gave her a pen – for I think I have 5 or 6 of these pens in various colors. I don’t remember ever tossing out a pen from Studley Chiropractic – and my mother quit going to him at least 10 years ago because she thought he had cracked a bone in her osteoporotic spine – and I think she was right – for she was in so much pain after a visit – and an x-ray showed there was a hairline fracture in the lumbar spine.  Looking back, I would say that was the beginning of her slow decline, for she stopped her decades-long daily walking routine after that – a hairline crack that would become the great divide between a healthy lifestyle without drugs and – the other side – though of course no one could see it at the time. I’ll bet that’s when the town’s prescription-zealous doctor began saying things like, this will help – and so a pain medication began, and then the refills cycled in – and maybe that’s how the pens advertising odd drugs got into her home.

Before the hairline crack in her spine, she would joke to us about her chiropractor and dentist sharing the same small office building on Main Street – only one dentist in town and one chiropractor in town – an unlikely partnership of two diverse professions, but one that made sense with so few professionals in town. The partnership was called “Studley and Dickie” – for the dentist’s name was Dr. Dickie.

She thought that was so funny – as did all the women, mostly widows, in her quilting group.

“I’ve got my appointments with Drs. Studley and Dickie today,” one woman might say.

“Two in one day?” another might be obliged to say before the whole quilting group cackled at the old joke. We – her children and grandchildren – never got tired of the joke, the way she said it anyway. It’s funny to me how Fate (another word for Humor, I suspect at times), has an easier time of creating such odd bedfellows in small towns than in the biggest of cities. I wonder if either of these dignified older men ever suspected how much fun the town’s elderly women were having with their names . . .

So my mother would schedule her dentist appointment . . . and since she was going into the building anyway, she would make a chiropractic appointment . . . and the quilting group would have met the day before or the day after – all as I imagine.

I suppose she picked up one pen from each appointment, for I have several of each that stand upright and alongside each other in the clay pot – and they have been the most humorous reminder of the trail she left.