The Gnomist... and Wishes for 2016.

[Madelaine McMasters]

The Monster Door is only one of many reasons I'm not afraid of the dark. The monsters were never scary. They were creatures I had to figure out via the door. If something scared me when I was little, we investigated it. Knowledge is poor dirt for growing fear.

I have no recollection of it, but Mom likes to recall my reaction to my own shadow when I was a toddler. It went something like this (oh, how I wish I'd inherited Mom's lovely red hair)...

Her response to my terror was to teach me how to make shadow puppets...

I walked around after that holding my hands in contorted poses and exclaiming "See! See!" while people (then, as now) wondered if I was nuts. Years later I would do shadow puppet shorts in front of the projector in the barn on movie night. Attack of the 50 Foot Bunny!

Look what happens when you take that form of play to its pinnacle...

No dark... no shadows.

;-).

[Dillon Levenque]

The little red-headed girl's (and yes, I said it that way on purpose) mom did not impress me, Maddy. When your kid starts crying for a reason, especially when that reason is fear, you don't just snicker. You don't just talk. You pick them up and hold them and calm them down. Once they are breathing normally you can talk about what's going on, explain things, whatever.

 

I loved that "shadow dancing" in the third selection. Never seen anything like that.

[Madelaine McMasters]

I didn't say that mom's response was like the mother's, but that mine was like the little girl's. According to mom, my hand puppeting lesson started right that instant. It took her a moment to calm me down, but by the time she was done, I was running around trying to show everybody my "butterfly".

Mom still does a better butterfly, but my bunny is killer.

The three of us tried some collaborative hand puppetry, but didn't get very far. We had much better luck with hand puppets. I still have all of them in the hall closet, except for Animal, who's sitting right here on my desk.

[Dillon Levenque]

I liked that quote. Chesterton is really a quote mine, it seems. Somehow, although I'd seen his name many times, I managed to go all this time without reading anything of his other than passages quoted here and there. I need to address that.

He was talking about the fairy tales of his youth, and maybe of his era, so slaying of dragons was pretty much the best option, and makng it the 'solution to the dragon problem' told children a solution existed.

Our modern fairy tales, from Disney and Pixar and the rest, tend to go in a direction more in line with Maddy's parents. The dragon/monster/scary entity is befriended or even just accepted. "Shrek" is a good example but there have been many like that (though maybe not as funny) before and since.

 

 

 

Edit: Spelled the name wrong (twice!): it's Chesterton, not Chesterson as I'd written. I bet that happens a lot.

[Dillon Levenque]

---

Madelaine McMasters wrote:

I didn't say that mom's response was like the mother's

, but that mine was like the little girl's.

---

Nor did I think for even an instant that it had been. The thought never entered my mind. I have heard enough stories of your parents to have a pretty good idea who they were, and neither of them would have acted like the mom (if that's who she was, mighta been a baby-sitter or something) in that video.

[Madelaine McMasters]

---

Dillon Levenque wrote:

---

Madelaine McMasters wrote:

I didn't say that mom's response was like the mother's

, but that mine was like the little girl's.

---

Nor did I think for even an instant that it had been. The thought never entered my mind. I have heard enough stories of your parents to have a pretty good idea who they were, and neither of them would have acted like the mom (if that's who she was, mighta been a baby-sitter or something) in that video.

---

While Mom didn't act like the "mother" in that video clip, I'm pretty sure she was chuckling on the inside. She knew everything would turn out fine because she was there.

I'm not that trustworthy.

[Dillon Levenque]

Sigh. It's always upsetting when a child raised by obviously good parents, a child who had every reason to be a good person herself,  turns out to be a nefarious ogress.

[Madelaine McMasters]

---

Dillon Levenque wrote:

I liked that quote. Chesterson is really a quote mine, it seems. Somehow, although I'd seen his name many times, I managed to go all this time without reading anything of his other than passages quoted here and there. I need to address that.

He was talking about the fairy tales of his youth, and maybe of his era, so slaying of dragons was pretty much the best option, and makng it the 'solution to the dragon problem' told children a solution existed.

Our modern fairy tales, from Disney and Pixar and the rest, tend to go in a direction more in line with Maddy's parents. The dragon/monster/scary entity is befriended or even just accepted. "Shrek" is a good example but there have been many like that (though maybe not as funny) before and since.

---

Gonna ramble...

Living in the country, my parents were probably most concerned about my safety in the woods, particularly at night. We didn't have nearly as many coyotes then as now, but the deer could be a concern. I was taught not to be too stealthy in the woods, so that the wild things would hear me coming and have a chance to flee, rather than fight me as I surprised them.

There are dangerous things in this world, and you are better off understanding them than being blindly afraid. By the time I noticed that some of my friends were afraid of the dark, I wondered why the hell they weren't more cautious about things that really wanted caution, like poison ivy. Leaves of three? Leave them be!

The monsters of my childhood were never scary. Not much was, unless I didn't understand it, like my shadow. As I mentioned before, if something scared me, we examined it. There is a shift in the handling of scary things from the fairy tales of Chesterton's youth to those of Pixar. I prefer Pixar's approach, which is to examine. Rather than "scary", I think "spooky" is a better word to describe the unknowns of my childhood world.

I love fairy tales too (particularly Fractured ones), but I think I was introduced to them differently than many children. Although Mom and Dad sat me on their laps and read me stories, most of them were made up... and interactive. I participated in their telling. I don't recall ever thinking that the fantasy was real, because we were making it up, but modern research says I did until I was four(ty five?). Half the stories of my youth were written by me. I married our family dog at least once.

I have fond memories of making Xmas presents for Mom (with Dad's help) and Dad (with Mom's help) and signing them "Santa". It was curious to see my friends belief in "Santa". They were missing out on the chance to be him! I was not raised to believe that magical things were real, but that reality was magical, and even more so when you understood it.

You may remember my telling of getting fired from my volunteer "Book Lady" gig at a friend's bookstore. I offered to replace the woman who'd been reading to kids on Saturday morning, for free. Unfortunately, I had a tendency to alter the stories. My friends started getting complaints from parents who'd return to the store saying "Sally says I'm reading the book all wrong!"

The story of mine you like best demonstrates another thing I was taught as a child. There is pleasure in the understanding of a thing. There is sometimes even greater pleasure in the misunderstanding of it. Here's another similar example, of how the  OSHA sign should read...



You've got time to stop for the slow ones.

 

 

It was an exciting time when we got asphalt on the part of our driveway near the house. Mom loved that we no longer tracked gravel indoors. Dad loved that we could now draw on the driveway with chalk. The first thing he drew was an airplane, which we promptly sat in... and flew away.

A Piece of Chalk

by G.K. Chesterton

I remember one splendid morning, all blue and silver, in the summer holidays when I reluctantly tore myself away from the task of doing nothing in particular, and put on a hat of some sort and picked up a walking-stick, and put six very bright-colored chalks in my pocket.

I then went into the kitchen (which, along with the rest of the house, belonged to a very square and sensible old woman in a Sussex village), and asked the owner and occupant of the kitchen if she had any brown paper. She had a great deal; in fact, she had too much; and she mistook the purpose and the rationale of the existence of brown paper. She seemed to have an idea that if a person wanted brown paper he must be wanting to tie up parcels; which was the last thing I wanted to do; indeed, it is a thing which I have found to be beyond my mental capacity.

Hence she dwelt very much on the varying qualities of toughness and endurance in the material. I explained to her that I only wanted to draw pictures on it, and that I did not want them to endure in the least; and that from my point of view, therefore, it was a question, not of tough consistency, but of responsive surface, a thing comparatively irrelevant in a parcel. When she understood that I wanted to draw she offered to overwhelm me with note-paper.

I then tried to explain the rather delicate logical shade, that I not only liked brown paper, but liked the quality of brownness in paper, just as I like the quality of brownness in October woods, or in beer.

Brown paper represents the primal twilight of the first toil of creation, and with a bright-colored chalk or two you can pick out points of fire in it, sparks of gold, and blood-red, and sea-green, like the first fierce stars that sprang out of divine darkness. All this I said (in an off-hand way) to the old woman; and I put the brown paper in my pocket along with the chalks, and possibly other things. I suppose every one must have reflected how primeval and how poetical are the things that one carries in one's pocket; the pocket-knife, for instance, the type of all human tools, the infant of the sword. Once I planned to write a book of poems entirely about things in my pockets. But I found it would be too long; and the age of the great epics is past.

With my stick and my knife, my chalks and my brown paper, I went out on to the great downs. . . .

I crossed one swell of living turf after another, looking for a place to sit down and draw. Do not, for heaven's sake, imagine I was going to sketch from Nature. I was going to draw devils and seraphim, and blind old gods that men worshipped before the dawn of right, and saints in robes of angry crimson, and seas of strange green, and all the sacred or monstrous symbols that look so well in bright colors on brown paper. They are much better worth drawing than Nature; also they are much easier to draw. When a cow came slouching by in the field next to me, a mere artist might have drawn it; but I always get wrong in the hind legs of quadrupeds. So I drew the soul of a cow; which I saw there plainly walking before me in the sunlight; and the soul was all purple and silver, and had seven horns and the mystery that belongs to all beasts. But though I could not with a crayon get the best out of the landscape, it does not follow that the landscape was not getting the best out of me. And this, I think, is the mistake that people make about the old poets who lived before Wordsworth, and were supposed not to care very much about Nature because they did not describe it much.

They preferred writing about great men to writing about great hills; but they sat on the great hills to write it. The gave out much less about Nature, but they drank in, perhaps, much more. They painted the white robes of their holy virgins with the blinding snow, at which they had stared all day. . . The greenness of a thousand green leaves clustered into the live green figure of Robin Hood. The blueness of a score of forgotten skies became the blue robes of the Virgin. The inspiration went in like sunbeams and came out like Apollo.

But as I sat scrawling these silly figures on the brown paper, it began to dawn on me, to my great disgust, that I had left one chalk, and that a most exquisite and essential chalk, behind. I searched all my pockets, but I could not find any white chalk. Now, those who are acquainted with all the philosophy (nay, religion) which is typified in the art of drawing on brown paper, know that white is positive and essential. I cannot avoid remarking here upon a moral significance. One of the wise and awful truths which this brown-paper art reveals, is this, that white is a color. It is not a mere absence of color; it is a shining and affirmative thing, as fierce as red, as definite as black. When, so to speak, your pencil grows red-hot, it draws roses; when it grows white-hot, it draws stars. And one of the two or three defiant verities of the best religious morality, of real Christianity, for example, is exactly this same thing; the chief assertion of religious morality is that white is a color. Virtue is not the absence of vices or the avoidance of moral dangers; virtue is a vivid and separate thing, like pain or a particular smell. Mercy does not mean not being cruel, or sparing people revenge or punishment; it means a plain and positive thing like the sun, which one has either seen or not seen.

Chastity does not mean abstention from sexual wrong; it means something flaming, like Joan of Arc. In a word, God paints in many colors; but he never paints so gorgeously, I had almost said so gaudily, as when He paints in white. In a sense our age has realized this fact, and expressed it in our sullen costume. For if it were really true that white was a blank and colorless thing, negative and non-committal, then white would be used instead of black and grey for the funereal dress of this pessimistic period. Which is not the case.

Meanwhile I could not find my chalk.

I sat on the hill in a sort of despair. There was no town near at which it was even remotely probable there would be such a thing as an artist's colorman. And yet, without any white, my absurd little pictures would be as pointless as the world would be if there were no good people in it. I stared stupidly round, racking my brain for expedients. Then I suddenly stood up and roared with laughter, again and again, so that the cows stared at me and called a committee. Imagine a man in the Sahara regretting that he had no sand for his hour-glass. Imagine a gentleman in mid-ocean wishing that he had brought some salt water with him for his chemical experiments. I was sitting on an immense warehouse of white chalk. The landscape was made entirely of white chalk. White chalk was piled more miles until it met the sky. I stooped and broke a piece of the rock I sat on: it did not mark so well as the shop chalks do, but it gave the effect. And I stood there in a trance of pleasure, realizing that this Southern England is not only a grand peninsula, and a tradition and a civilization; it is something even more admirable. It is a piece of chalk.

[Madelaine McMasters]

...beams.