Why I Don't Write Children's Literature Read Free

stronger jaws for chomping on bones, and were shorter and thicker in build, like running backs. They were from the valley of Neander in what is now Germany. They mated without romance and died in blizzards or from tumbling off cliffs in search of rabbits, long-horned deer, and edible roots anchored in ice-hard earth. The Neanderthals invented tools: sticks to hold rabbits over a fire, stone axes to break the snouts of onrushing bears.
    I could study humankind, of course. But now, with the summery light vanquished, I’m pausing to consider nature as a subject worth knowing. I’m unfamiliar with foliage, for instance. Last summer a child held up a flower and asked, “What genus is this?” I twirled the stalk and answered, “The yellow bloom group.” I pointed to another cluster and replied, “Those are from the white-power flower group.” I led the child to the lake. With confidence I remarked that the moon is responsible for making waves pitch upwards to tremendous heights and for making men go crazy. I told this neighbor child that my beard stands up when I pull laundry from the dryer — static electricity, you know, along with the ghosts of the Industrial Revolution.
    The sun wheeled, darkness spread its ash, and the winds of autumn removed strands of my hair. The day was nearly over when the child asked, “What star is that?”
    â€œWhich star?” I asked, standing near the apple tree in my yard.
    The child pointed. “The one next to Polaris, just outside of Orion’s belt.”
    Was this boy a genius with a Band-Aid on his elbow? I bit my thumbnail, feigning deep rumination, and replied, “That there, sonny, is the Lucky Star.”
    The wind picked up, taking a few more strands of my hair, the ones I considered bangs. I sighed and named this sigh Shame . I do not possess even a GED in time or in planets. Let Cassiopeia shift, roll, spin, or hurl — whatever she can do to fill the black holes of my education.
    Gombrich’s history fails to touch upon folklore — a pity. I wonder what our early efforts were like, chewing the fat around a Neanderthal campfire. What stories were made up to scare children, for instance? I sometimes return to the cautionary tales of my own childhood, to Chicken Little and the Big Bad Wolf. They’re worth pondering, I think. It’s too bad that the Three Blind Mice and the Tortoise and Hare are absent from the historian’s timeline of human nature. I would have enjoyed his interpretation of Humpty Dumpty’s tumble from the wall. Was the big egg nothing but an omelet that never found his way to a plate?
    With daylight savings time, I may bone up on myths and folklore. Or I may narrow my interest to everyday creatures that tread on all fours, such as my cat, who is presently napping in my recliner. He thinks he’s me. I have known him for 16 years but he has known me, in cat years, for 103. At least this is what I calculate from my position on the carpeted floor. I move from an easy yoga pose into a deep stretch, hand gripping the knob of my big toe. When I meow in slight pain, he opens one eye, assesses my presence, then closes that eye. Opening both eyes just to see me would be too much trouble.
    In our reversed roles, he in the recliner and me on the floor, there must be another cautionary tale. Am I nothing but an older man, or do my bushy eyebrows signal the start of a new species? Or could these eyebrows represent a gene leftover from Mr. Neanderthal? I’ll have to read A Little History of the World more thoroughly, to see if it was possible for those genes to travel over the centuries into my own polluted bloodstream. For now, I recognize my genetic history only as backdrop. In my standing yoga pose, I’m shadow and light. That’s all some of us can be: shadow and light. I am a doer of no great deeds, powerless to arouse a meow from my cat. He won’t even open both eyes for me.
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