MAGICAL CONNECTIONS

Years ago I created a book that felt like magic for the whole time I worked on it. It is called PIECES OF CHRISTMAS and was a gift to me from Holt. They let me work on a surreal idea....a set of poems set inside a snow globe with the premise that Santa calls the North Wind to recycle the letters he's answered...."he calls the North Wind to swirl them around, and pieces of Christmas come falling down ". Each piece of Christmas is a stamp torn from an envelope, with a poem. The image on the left is part of the spread for the following poem:

On Pennsylvania Avenue
Possums pray for me and you-
Please bless this world and bless this town
and those whose lives are upside down.

At the end of the book you find yourself watching Santa fall asleep after delivering his gifts. The stamps are part of the quilt he is sleeping under and the pieces of Christmas...the fragments of letters my own children wrote that Santa sent back to me...are now part of the snow in the globe. My editors knew it was a long shot but believed in dreams. The book monetarily has not done as well as my others, but I think there is something more important about it. Those who like it, love it in the way we are thrilled when we feel those unexpected connections, forming in our brains. Universal studios used a spread from the book in a movie and the director bought the picture. I think he knows how to make those magical connections as well. As an artist and a writer, those are the connections I hope for.

If you were a possum, or a person like me you would find yourself thinking that we have turned our values upside down in the last ten years and are only now trying to right ourselves. The one thing we can hang on to is our mind's ability to make connections that are new and exciting, whether they explain our real world that we deal with or the imaginary world that we are trying to form.

I take care of my grandson, Jack, one day a week. It is a day of sitting on the "apple porch" where we eat our apples off the tree (I'll be buying those soon), getting eggs from Donna's chickens and cooking them for lunch and making magical connections. Yesterday he watched my dog, Blue, chase vultures in the sky. I ask him if Blue could catch the vultures. He is almost two and he told me "Blue need wings to catch birds." He didn't tell me Blue couldn't catch birds, just told me the next step. He astounded me. His mind is building those magical connections that tell a story. Last night as the moon came up, we sat on the porch before we took him home, and Jack said, "Blue catch the moon". When I looked at him, he said, "Blue need wings to fly to catch the moon". Then he grinned and said, "Teasing Grandma." I looked at him in wonder as I realized he is already learning how to craft a story that makes him happy.

That night, while having dinner with my daughter and her husband, they told me he could tell a joke. They said, "Jack, can you tell a joke?" His response was "JOKE!" and the laughter of a standup comedian. While my husband says I'm the one telling this story, he has to admit those first magical connections are being formed in our grandson's young mind.

And for those of us being asked to underestimate the connections that young children can make while reading books, or being read to, I have to say, we need to counter that with the fact that our main job is to form new magical connections in their minds.