I couldn’t limit Little Women to one post.

One of the things that I liked about Jo, was that she was always her own person, which is why it annoyed me that her writing was put aside for the entire duration of Little Men as if her entire identity was now wrapped up in being Mother Bhaer. True, Alcott made her a successful author in the fourth book in the series (Jo’s Boys), but it wasn’t the same.

Even so, I’d have given anything to be one of the only girls at Plumfield. Daisy’s cooking lessons had me laughing, but also made me realize that even if you never cook, you should know how (men and women both) if only so you can survive. And I’ll admit, when I was nine, and had just started cello lessons, I had a bit of a crush on Demi and Nat.

Mostly, though, this book brings me back to my mother’s voice, soft lamplight, snow outside the window, and a single chapter each night NEVER being enough.

“If you mean libel, I’d say so, and not talk about labels as if Papa was a pickle bottle,” advised Jo, laughing., — Louisa May Alcott, Little Women

The winter of ’77 was the coldest of my childhood, but my mother managed to bring a warm glow to my bedside every night, despite the three-foot thick ice on the roads outside, by making sure I was curled up, with my dog nearby, and a glass of water on the nightstand. Once I was snuggled beneath cool non-pilled sheets, she would read to me, turning the thin pages of the book softly, and doing all the voices.

This was my introduction to Jo March, and her sisters Meg, Beth and Amy, and though they may be fictional, they have been close friends ever since. Jo, of course, is who I wanted, not just to meet, but to BE. When I developed my own literary aspirations several years later, I found an old black velvet beret, stapled a red bow to it, and wore it as my writing cap, just like the cap SHE had in the book. When she refused to marry Laurie Laurence, I was outraged, the first time I read it. Re-reading the book for a class years after, I was still outraged, but this time it was because Jo was right and Laurie couldn’t see that. Apparently, love really is blind.

Little Women is often lumped in with lesser childrens fiction, but it’s really a special novel because its one of the first that depicts girls of that time period as real people, not just one-dimensional characters in skirts. It lets us see the child within the woman who emerges, and the woman within each girl. It shows us their playtime as well as their work, and represents a world that isn’t ideal, but is still home.

I now re-read it once a year, and each time, I get something new out of it.

Having lived in two places now, where it seems that it is always summer, and never midwinter, the concept of a wintry landscape 24x7x365 has it’s temptations. Or it did, anyway, before I spent three years in SoDak, where there are only two seasons: winter and road construction. Winters there are ridiculously cold. You know this because it is possible to walk outside on a sunny winter day, with the thermometer at zero and think it’s positively balmy because at least it’s not windy, or below zero.

But when I read The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe for the first time, I was unaware of the temperature differences betwen Sioux Falls and San Francisco, just as I was unaware of the intense amount of Christian mythology within the story. To me, it was just a good story. In some ways, it still is.

The notion of secret worlds is one I’ve always appreciated. My grandfather’s basement held both terror (with it’s Freddy Krueger-esque boiler in the center) and joy (watching my words form wavy lines on the oscilloscope), and there really was a wardrobe in the room I slept in during my endless summers there.

I enjoyed the tales of Peter, Susan, Edmund, and Lucy and their adventures because, no matter what else the Narnia books are, they are great stories, with believable children, who aren’t perfect or beautiful, or gifted with otherworldly powers – they even bicker the way normal kids do – if comedy comes from truth, doesn’t fantasy have to, also?

Of course, when I saw the movie last year, I had to confess to my good friend Bripadme, “I felt really really sick and wrong in the theater, because I was going, “Lucy, adorable, woods, glorious, Mr. Tumnus: So. Damned. Hot.”

Yes, you now know my dirtiest secret. I lust after fauns.

So I’ve just inhaled an order of peach French toast at Denny’s. I ordered it on a whim (note to Fuzzy: you still owe me a cheeseburger), and wow, it was fragrantly peachy. Would have been better with vanilla ice cream instead of maple syrup, though.

Speaking of peaches, as a second-grader at Georgetown Elementary School in teeny Georgetown, CO, we still had story-time. GE was an open school, with places to sprawl and read, and hex tables instead of individual desks, and I learned more in that school than in all of my other education combined. (Well, not really, but it was my FAVORITE school.)

One of the books I first encountered during story time was Roald Dahl’s James and the Giant Peach, which I think sparked my love of fantasy and science fiction, because what could be more fantastic than living inside the pit of a giant peach? I wasn’t all that thrilled with the talking insects James found himself spending time with, but then, I got the creepy crawlies from reading Charlotte’s Web the first time, as well. I don’t DO insects. Or arachnids.

Anyway, I have special memories of lying on my stomach, with my Buster Brown-shod feet kicked up behind me and a small pillow wrapped in my arms, for resting my head while we worked our way to the center of the story, and the center of the peach, one chapter at a time.

I get impatient, now, when people read to me, because they take too long, but as a seven-year-old, I was still completely a thrall of the human voice.

In an hold house in Paris
that was covered with vines
lived twelve little girls
in two straight lines
— Ludwig Bemelmans

I didn’t actually really like the Madeline books as a child, but a few years ago, searching for inspiration to help design a dragon for a MUSH, a dragon for a small spunky redhead, a dragon from a clutch with a theme of children’s stories, I found Madeline and fell in love.

She’s a little French orphan who gets into the worst possible trouble, and always ends up a heroine, thanks to her intelligence, ingenuity and charm – how could you not love a character like that. More spunky than actually cute, she’s precocious, a trait I’m more than a little bit familiar with, and vivacious – a trait I wish I had more of.

While I don’t generally like picture books, in these books the drawings are worth bending my rule for, because they manage to be almost minimalist, and yet full of detail at the same time.

A study in contrasts, like the main character herself.

(Posted from Denny’s where my peach French toast is getting cold.)

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From the time I was five to the time I was eleven I took ballet lessons. For the most part, I loved it. Not so much the tulle, as I never got to the pointe shoes and pink tutus stage of dance, but for the music and the lights, and the pink tights. There’s something really charming about little girls in pink tights.

When I was six, Auntie Annette (not an actual relative, but one of those affectionate aunts that families tend to acqire) gifted me with the childrens book / photo essay A Very Young Dancer, about a little girl named Stephanie who was studying at the School for American Ballet. In the book, we follow Stephanie to her regular dance class, and then to the auditions for the annual New York City Ballet production of The Nutcracker, through rehearsals (she’s cast as the ingenue) and performances. The pictures are full pages, in grainy black and white, and yet, even without color they share the magic of music and theatre and willful suspension of disbelief. In those pictures, even though you KNOW that Mother Ginger is a guy in makeup and hoopskirts, and wearing stilts, you totally believe that little dancers live within the skirts.

It was my favorite book for the longest time, and I’m fairly certain I still have it tucked away somewhere, right there with “Dance me a story,” which was how I fell in love with the story of Giselle, and an ancient album that featured Bob “Captain Kangaroo” Keeshan hosting / narrating Peter and the Wolf, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, and The Nutcracker (the latter performed as if it was a musical).

Years after I’d put the dancing behind me, I was working props for the Fresno Ballet, and one of my jobs was to help Mother Ginger into her (his) stilts…and it didn’t spoil the magic a bit.

Dance if you feel the least down-hearted
Dance and you’ll feel good once you’ve started
You’ll ho with a hee and a ha, and a yip
And a yep full of pep as you step, step, step!

As I enter hour seven of Blogathon 2006, I’d like to remind everyone that while blogging every half hour from various locations is kind of fun, there’s also a purpose to this insanity.

I’m doing this to help raise money for First Book, and I need you to sponsor me. Don’t feel like you have to pledge the farm, $5 buys two books. That’s two kids who get hooked on reading, and on the special pride that comes with their OWN books. (As a comparison, $5 is only slightly more than the average venti coffee drink at Starbucks, and a book lasts a lot longer than a cup of froufrou coffee.)

As an added incentive, I’m offering sponsorship gifts. At the end of the blogathon, I’ll be tossing the names of all my sponsors in a hat, and drawing some names. Three people will get copies of one of the books I talk about during this project, two people will get the a book along with a special gift box that goes with the book (details are a surprise), and one person will get the book, the gift box, and a $10 gift certificate to their choice of Amazon.com, Barnes and Noble, or Borders.

So, join me in supporting First Book.
Click here, and sponsor me today.

…though I do have some with turquoise scotties that say “woof woof” in purple. I’m all for whimsical nightwear. But Alexander, my favorite Judith Viorst character, did have railroad train pajamas, which he hated, as much as he hated lima beans and kissing on tv. (Me, I like lima beans, and prefer kissing Fuzzy while *watching* tv, but…um…yeah…)

Received as a gift when I was all of five, Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day is one of my favorite books even today. It was written for children, but it’s not at all childish. I mean, who hasn’t dumped their sweater in the sink or felt like no matter what they do it’s somehow not enough at some point in their lives.

A few weeks ago, I wrote an entry in the style of Alexander…, which is now hidden away in a different database, but my love of the tale remains. There’s something about the rhythm and cadence that makes it as memorable as the story itself.

Some books are just like that.
Even when they’re kiddie-lit.

I was eight or nine when I met Harriet M. Welsch (who knows perfectly well she has no middle name), and her friends Sport and Janie, and her nanny Ole Golly, and I was instantly enraptured. Then there was the scene where she instructed the cook that she wanted a tomato sandwich, turning down offers of many other delicacies in favor of the tangy pulpy fruit.

She was a wise little girl.

Harriet lived in New York, of course, so it’s safe to assume that the tomatos on her famous sandwiches were from New Jersey, which is as it should be. I maintain that you have not truly tasted a proper tomato until you’ve had one nurtured in the rich soil of the Garden State. (If you should happen to pop a cherry-sized bit of tomato-y bliss into your mouth while standing barefoot in said soil, and while you, the earth and the tomato are pleasantly warm from the sun, so much the better.) No tomato compares. Truly.

Whenever there’s food in a novel, or story, I want to experience it. One of my fantasies, in fact, is to open a bookstore cafe where all the menu items are from literature. The mystery room would have gourmet dinners worthy of Nero Wolfe’s approval, but it would also offer proper afternoon teas, hosted by Miss Marple look-alikes (dead bodies optional). The science fiction room would have chocolate chai masquerading as klah, and stews would be cooked over bunsen burners a la the mother in A Wrinkle in Time, but I digress.

Harriet introduced me to tomato sandwiches and got me hooked on writing, as I was already hooked on reading. With Harriet’s inspiration, I started a neighborhood newspaper using my grandfather’s old gun-metal grey manual typewriter and a table-top mimeograph machine, I began keeping notebooks of thoughts and ideas, and I started flirting with journals, though, because I’ve got a strong fickle streak, the latter never lasted.

I’m sitting here now in Barnes and Noble, Cedar Hill, Texas, sipping chai and finishing a grilled cheese and tomato sandwich, and toasting Harriet the Spy, and imaginative little girls everywhere.