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

to daylight savings time.
    * * *
    The day speeds across the sky, siphoning gratitude away. True, there is some sunlight, and true, we can get much done in these shortened times. That said, I pay homage to DeLoss McGraw, a friend and artist of whimsical nature and enduring charm, who is underappreciated by our nation. Why doesn’t a foundation award him a prize? Why doesn’t Mr. Google open a large wallet and say, “Pick out the hundreds”? I possess five of McGraw’s paintings. One hangs in the hallway; I pass it every few minutes as I move around the house. It’s a largish pastel of my wife Carolyn and me in our best light and maybe our best years: we’re young, standing face to face, with our arms coming up to touch one another. There is a fire above Carolyn’s head, the genius of love. Here is the positive nature of marriage done in bright blues, yellows, and reds. The foreground holds a house: love has found a house and will live there for many years.
    We have black holes in our education and much larger holes in our gratitude. DeLoss McGraw, favorite artist, if you would allow me to open my wallet, you may pick out all the twenties.

WORDS WE DON’T KNOW
    I use the public library weekly and, when I return home, stash my haul on a bookshelf. On the shelf at this moment are several histories, a gardening book, and Ian McEwan’s The Child in Time , a novel about the abduction of a three-year-old girl and the unraveling of her parents’ marriage — guilt, anger, grief, loneliness. I’m a quarter of the way through this tidy novel but may return it to the library, unfinished. Words are underlined in pencil by one of the previous readers who, I suspect, was trying to improve her vocabulary — “deciduous,” “reptilian,” “affability,” “provenance,” “slow loris,” “averse,” etc.
    The underlined words have halted my progress and not because of annoyance. As a poet, invariably searching for the right words myself, I began to consider the author of these pencil strikes. I couldn’t help but wonder about this previous reader — the culprit, let’s say. She was female, near my age (early sixties), and reflective about the years lost on a no-good husband. Like the dainty pencil marks, she was understated in every way — touch, voice, makeup, and clothes. I began to imagine her as a reader of admirably crafted contemporary fiction (published in 1987, I still consider McEwan’s novel “contemporary”). Perhaps a nurse attracted to the novel’s theme — a child abducted and nowhere to be found. Or a psychologist — but no, that was wrong too. A psychologist would have known most of the underlined words, as would a nurse. Maybe an inexperienced bookworm, on her way to the morning shift by bus?
    Who was she? I assigned her the details of a life story. A widow, she read the novel late at night, with cotton balls in her ears against the noisy neighbor above, while a moth batted around the lamp and a cat the color of smoke slept at her feet. No — she was an office worker on her lunch hour in a park with graffiti-marked trees. A duck with a white ring around its neck was eyeballing her from three feet away. Did she have a crust of bread to quiet its quacking? But no, I was hasty: she was really a florist in rubber boots, her breath condensing in the cold, with a surplus of roses in tall buckets to sell by late afternoon.
    Conjecture, all of it, but one fact remained: a reader had underlined words. In doing so, she had embraced the view that learning doesn’t end. She might have been a mail carrier padding about in corrective shoes (this is how I saw her by page 180), but she was not about to give up on her head, now capped with grayish hair.
    There are thousands of words we don’t know, long or short, soft or clunky, seen in print or heard in conversation. We can just let them go,