Inner-city Dendrology, or How a Title Can Destroy a Blog

I've started this entry a few times and it keeps refusing to go anywhere. A big problem is trying to find book quotes from it. Cause the book I'm going to talk about in a bit has great quotes, but all the ones on the internet are not my favorite. This is because I'm essentially better than the internet.

"Better than the internet!" Yeah, I'm pretty sure that's going to be the catchphrase for this blog from this point on.

Oh wait I found the quotes I wanted. Sorry, Internet. Friends?

Anyway, the other reason is because I didn't have an intro, but man oh man did I just kill it just then. Killed. It.

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Betty Smith

For most of my life the only thing I knew about this book was that it existed and was probably a classic because it was in a Looney Tunes episode "A Hare Grows in Manhattan." I tried to embed the video but every version of it is broken. I think there's another gag where books are all literal and like a tree grows out of the book or something? I watched a lot of Looney Tunes as a young kid but I was also doing a lot of drugs back then so I might not remember everything and it's possible that I made some of it up.

So there you go, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. There's a tree in it. Good morning everyone, enjoy your day. I hope my humble lil' blog cheered you up a little.

“If there was only one tree like that in the world, you would think it was beautiful. But because there are so many, you just can't see how beautiful it really is.” 

OK, I did actually read it. There is a tree in it, but guys, the tree is a metaphor. Get this. Francie Nolan, who I have now learned is one of the most beloved characters in American Literature, is a little girl growing up in severe poverty in Brooklyn. Her parents are described like this:

“Katie had a fierce desire for survival which made her a fighter. Johnny had a hankering after immortality which made him a useless dreamer. And that was the great difference between these two who loved each other so well.” 

Francie's mom is a pragmatist

“I hate all those flirty-birty games that women make up. Life's too short. If you ever find a man you love, don't waste time hanging your head and simpering. Go right up to him and say, 'I love you. How about getting married?” 

And then there's Francie:

“And the child, Francie Nolan, was of all the Rommelys and all the Nolans. She had the violent weaknesses and passion for beauty of the shanty Nolans. She was a mosaic of her grandmother Rommely's mysticism, her tale-telling, her great belief in everything and her compassion for the weak ones. She had a lot of her grandfather Rommely's cruel will. She had some of her Aunt Evy's talent for mimicking, some of Ruthie Nolan's possessiveness. She had Aunt Sissy's love for life and her love for children. She had Johnny's sentimentality without his good looks. She had all of Katie's soft ways and only half of the invisible steel of Katie. She was made up of all these good and these bad things. 

She was made up of more, too. She was the books she read in the library. She was the flower in the brown bowl. Part of her life was made from the tree growing rankly in the yard. She was the bitter quarrels she had with her brother whom she loved dearly. She was Katie's secret, desparing weeping. She was the shame of her father staggering home drunk. 

She was all of these things and of something more that did not come from the Rommelys nor the Nolans, the reading, the observing, the living from day to day. It was something that had been born into her and her only- the something different from anyone else in the two families. It was what God or whatever is His equivalent puts into each soul that is given life- the one different thing such as that which makes no two fingerprints on the face of the earth alike.”  

You guys I love Francie. I love her mom, and her brother, and her dad, even though her dad is a drunk and her poor mother has to work her beautiful hands to callouses to make up for his drunkenness. You guys her dad does something so sweet for Francie that I can barely write about it. It's one of the loveliest things that has happened in a book that I've ever read. Please read it and tell me what you think.



Post-script:

So I Googled "Brooklyn kittens" and what I came up with was a gem. According to this article, two kittens were on the Brooklyn subway and it was shut down to rescue them. This turned into a fight between two mayoral candidates over whether liking kitties was a good thing which included one candidate posing with a tiger cub and then, surprisingly, a debate about Muslims where "Moses never killed anyone." Listen, I've seen The Prince of Egypt. Don't mess with Moses, is what I'm saying.

Notes on an expanding universe

I love that I keep introducing blog posts with my big goals for keeping up to date on posts. I'm like, "Hey guys you'll get two of these a week." And you're like good one.

And it probably is a good one. Probably as good a one as any of the ones I've put in here during the last couple of weeks. The fun part is that when I put a joke out it's like making a lovely pie and sending it out in to space. Nobody's going to eat the pie, because nobody is out there paying attention in space. My best hope is that said pie bounces off a satellite or something and the satellite looks over it's satellite shoulder and says, "did something just hit me?" And then the satellite shrugs.

Also the pie was made of gravel.

Listen. I know you just read that and thought now that's something I could never do. Make a simile about pies and satellites. This is why I'm me and you're you and you're probably very happy with yourself and I have to constantly seek approval by writing blogs that no one reads.

Is it kitten time yet?

So let me look at this here Goodreads app to see what else I've read and not considered. Oh yeah!

Flora and Ulysses: The Illuminated Adventures, by Kate DiCamillo

I blame comic books for not writing, so I can blame Super Mario Land 3D for not blogging. And not reading new books. And not making any friends on the train. Oh, I guess I can blame a dry persistent cough and my tendency to look like someone you don't want to start a conversation with for the latter part. Hey, I'm on a train and I'm interested in talking to a stranger. There's a cute college girl or that guy in the hoody buried in a Nintendo machine with the twitchy eye. I wonder how many Pokemon he's found!

So instead of reading my own books for fun I read books to my girls before they go to bed. And the most recent one we read was Newberry Award winner Flora and Ulysses.

A lot of folks assume it's easy to write a children's book. And obviously it is easy if you want to churn out garbage. 

<Ahem> Hey, I'm a big-time celebrity and I don't have talents but people recognize my name. I'll write a book about an oyster who gets bullied or whatever. 

That's my impression of some people who are writing children's books.

But the people who are really doing it are doing the hardest job there is, I think. Here's a brief digression that will eventually lead back to the book at hand. The book I read to the girls right before this one was Ramona the Brave by Beverly Cleary. And here's another digression: when I was growing up my mom would read scary books every once in a while. Not often, because she said she needed to get the scary out of her system from the last book before she could read another one. Well that's how I am with Ramona Quimby books, instead of being scared I start crying at some point in every one of those books. The reason why is because when I read a Ramona Quimby book I can see how my girls are seeing the world and it breaks my heart a little that even when Ramona's parents and teachers are doing their very best she's still pretty confused and sad and disappointed in life sometimes. And scared. And it hits me that my kids feel like that too and it's just part of growing up and why do they need to go and do a thing like that?

Anyway, Flora and Ulysses is another book that does that. Flora is dealing with rougher stuff than Ramona ever did and I think it makes sense for a modern book for her to have to deal with divorced parents who don't understand her sometimes. Her mom especially is wrapped up in her writing career and worries that Flora is too weird and wants to discourage that so that she can be a normal, happy girl. The discovery of a super-powered squirrel who she is determined to mold into a superhero who can fight crime doesn't help this situation. There's a whole other cast of weirdos and Flora is told at one point that "the universe is expanding." During her adventure she discovers insights about said universe that expands the way she sees it, too.

"Nothing
would be
easier without
you,
because you
are 
everything,
all of it-
sprinkles, quarks, giant
donuts, eggs sunny-side up-
you
are the ever-expanding
universe
to me.” 

One thought I had while reading this is that happily there has never been a better time to be a little weird as a kid. When I was young I felt like it was important to hide my enthusiasm for your Metroids and Zeldas and Marios and your what-have-yous from my peers. For every secret I revealed about warp zones I had to make sure to know enough about the Dallas Cowboys and 49ers to please my peers. Of course I failed, but I still tried.

Now my son can wear a Minecraft hat to school and the other kids say, "Minecraft, cool." My daughter can be obsessed with dragons and Legos and make little shields and swords out of paper for her Mega Man figure and nobody gives a crap. 

I'm not saying the world is a better place except that I kind of am. There's this climate change thing that is making animals like pikas have to really struggle and that bums me out kind of a lot. But people are also generally getting cooler about each other's weirdness and that's fantastic. 

Anyway. Flora and Ulysses is very, very sweet. It's funny, too. And insightful. The illustrations are adorable. And the universe is expanding. Turns out in an expanding universe there's room for everybody, which is a nice thing to remember every once in a while.