The Wind Call - by Rosalie K. Fry

My Favorite Childhood Reads

This book, with its worn hardback cover, has been with me perhaps longer than any other. Mom and Dad would read me chapters at bedtime before I learned to read on my own. The author shares our family name. I’ve often wondered if that’s why my parents (or grandparents?) bought the book.

It’s the story of a tiny boy, a child of the Little People, who arrives unexpectedly in an English garden. An assortment of birds is checking out a strange new plant, something the gardener brought home from a recent holiday in the tropics, when they find the dark-eyed infant sleeping in a flower. The kid is obviously far from home with no one to take care of him. So a pair of songbirds takes him to their nest in a hawthorn tree, and he grows up with three newly hatched chicks.

The “wind call” in the title is that subtle change in the air that marks the approach of fall, telling migratory birds that it’s time to fly south. Father Blackcap sings the little ones to sleep every night with a song about the great flight and their sunny winter home by the Mediterranean Sea.

When his adopted brothers are ready for their first flying lesson, the boy, Pierello, is old enough to climb out of the nest and make his way to the ground. He spends an idyllic summer learning to fend for himself in the woods: picking wild berries, sliding down little waterfalls in the burbling stream, consorting with glow-worms, butterflies, dormice, and all types of birds. There are line drawings of Pierello and his friends, and a half-dozen color pictures printed on special paper. Behind all these happy adventures looms the novel’s Big Question: will this wingless child find a way to go south with his family when the Wind Call comes?

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Looking back, I wonder if my love of nature began with this fairy tale. Many of its creatures were (and still are) unfamiliar to a kid growing up in Texas, but I’ve always suspected the portrayals were accurate. Today, thanks to the Internet, it’s not hard to check. I did some surfing and found that yes, male and female blackcaps do share chick-rearing duties. Nightjars really do fly silently and lay their camouflaged eggs on bare ground.

And what about the author and illustrator, Rosalie K. Fry? I didn't think I'd ever heard of her, aside from this book. But it turns out she wrote several others, and one became the basis for the indie film The Secret of Roan Inish. Wow. Who knew?

The Zany World of Dr. Seuss

My Favorite Childhood Reads

Dr. Seuss has his own Facebook wall. The Grinch is all over it, urging visitors to “grow your heart 3 sizes” by doing a good deed each day from now until Christmas.

I read some odd books as a kid. In some ways, Dr. Seuss’s books are among the oddest – but they’re also some of the best known and universally loved. Who doesn’t instantly recognize the Cat in the Hat’s red-striped stovepipe? Who couldn’t, on command, recite a few lines of Green Eggs and Ham?

I think The Cat in the Hat was the first Seuss book I read. I loved it. It was so much better than those dull Dick-and-Jane readers we used in primary school. I was even more fascinated when the Cat came back, left a nasty ring in his unwilling hosts’ bathtub, and wound up staining the whole hillside a garish pink.

Having gotten acquainted with the distinctive look of Dr. Seuss characters, I started to seek them out whenever I went to the library. I met Horton the elephant, Sam-I-Am, Bartholomew Cubbins of the 500 hats, the pointlessly prejudiced Sneetches, the parade of wildly fanciful creatures that marched across the pages of If I Ran the Zoo and If I Ran the Circus (two of my favorites.) And of course the immortal Grinch, who tried to eliminate Christmas and wound up saving himself.

I am clearly not the only kid who never forgot these stories. Just last night I went Christmas caroling with a group of friends. We came upon a front-yard display with life-size cutouts of the Grinch, his dog Max and a whole village of Whos. No kids in sight, just a middle-aged man who came out to listen. We sang him all six verses of “You’re a Mean One, Mr. Grinch” from the movie version of How the Grinch Stole Christmas.

As a writer, I have other reasons to admire Dr. Seuss. His galloping verses, so easy to read, couldn’t have been easy to write. But he kept turning them out, decade upon decade, still publishing new works long after I grew up. The Seuss Enterprises website says there are 44 books under the name of Dr. Seuss, plus 22 more that he wrote under other pen names. Okay, none of them is a tome like War and Peace, but still. Each one tells a story, or presents a new idea, or makes a point. And of course he did his own illustrations, too.

Here’s a bit that’s often mentioned in writers’ workshops, when they’re coaching us on the kind of determination it may take to break into the publishing market: Dr. Seuss’s first kiddie book, And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street, was turned down by at least twenty publishers. They didn’t know what to do with it. They couldn’t see where it fit. What if he’d given up after the tenth rejection letter? Or the 12^th, or the 15^th? This story lives in my memory bank and pops up whenever I need reminding: if I really have something to say, don’t let the naysayers hush me up.

Theodor Seuss Geisel had plenty to say, and he’s still saying it. Go to the kids’ section of your library, your favorite bookstore, and you’ll see. Pull up one of the movies based on his books (they're still making new ones!) Or go check out some holiday decorations.