learning from books.

from The Girl with the Brown Crayon by Vivian Gussin Paley

The Easy Tree

Perhaps all paths this year do lead to Leo Lionni. The day after her father's story, Reeny asks, “How come no one dies?”. She points to our Leo Lionni bookshelf.

“Yeah they do,” Bruce calls from his checkers game with Walter. “All those little red fish got ate by the big tuna.”

“I mean like a mother or a father, like in Cinderella, or a grandfather.”

“Are you remembering your father's story, that he told us his grandfather died?” I ask.

“I'm remembering about Jenny's mother,” Reeny says. “Will they tell us about that?”

“I doubt it, Reeny.” Unless someone asks.”

Jenny's father and grandmother are coming today. “Not my mother,” Jenny reminded us. She has told us about her mother's death many times. She is willing to repeat the story as often as she is asked and will bring the subject up on her own when she wants to talk about her mother. “I was two years old,” she'll say. “My mother had cancer. That means she was very, very sick. Sometimes I can't remember her face so I get her picture and look at it.”

Mr. Bergen and his mother arrive after lunch. I feel we are entering a three-generational novel, beginning with Jenny's memories and going backward in time. Leo Lionni cannot supply such stories for us. We need real people, real family members to tell us this part of who we are.

“When I was your age,” Mr. Bergen begins, “we had a tree in our little town called 'the easy tree'. That was because everyone in town could climb it, even little children. Then one day I wasn't careful enough and I fell from its lowest branch. I was bruised all over, but my brother said, “Don't tell anyone, okay? We'll say you fell off your bike. Because if you tell them, then we won't have a tree to call the easy tree anymore.”

The children smile at Mr. Bergen. In some way, each one understands that there must always be an easy tree; one cannot give up hope. The elderly Mrs. Bergen looks warmly at her son. “John, you never told me that story. I didn't know you fell out of the easy tree.”

“Should Daddy have told you?” Jenny asks her grandmother. Everyone waits for the answer; this is not the sort of question the children expect in the classroom. But Mrs. Bergen replies comfortably. “Well, your dad trusted his brother to know what was best. Now, children, my story is about a place with no easy tree. When I was little we lived on a farm in Nova Scotia. The ground was so hard you could hardly grow anything. But we were lucky. We had a cow that always gave milk, the sweetest milk ever tasted.”

“Was that the easy tree?” Reeny asks.

Mrs. Bergen looks deeply into Reeny's face. “Come up here, child. Let me give you a hug, may I? You just gave me something good to think about. Our good dependable cow, she certainly was our easy tree. You're absolutely right.”

While Mrs. Bergen finishes her story, in which the cow is lost and then found in the middle of a frozen pond, unable to get off, I can't help wondering if Reeny's ability to use the easy tree as a metaphor is due to the practice we've had in analyzing Leo Lionni.

Yet isn't it more likely the other way around? That is, the Leo Lionni stories and the easy-tree stories work so well because the children come to school knowing how to think about such matters. We need only to give them the proper context in which to demonstrate and fine-tune their natural gifts.

There are, of course, certain contexts each child brings independently. “Was your cow brown?” Reeny asks.

Mrs. Bergen laughs. “Well, yes, mostly brown she was that. We called her Cocoa. Why do you ask, Reeny?”

“Because she's a easy-tree cow. Brown is easy.”

Family Discussion

When Reeny's grandmother picks her up after school I hand her Mr. McMouse. “Will you read this book, Ettie, and tell me what you make of it? We're having trouble with the mirror scene. This is no Swimmy, I can tell you.”

Miss Ettie calls me that evening after dinner. “Vivian, my first thought was, this is what happens to colored folks who hang out with too many white people. They lose their image.”

“That was your first thought. And then. . .?”

“Well, then I talked about it with Reeny and she did not agree with me at all. She said, 'Grandma, if you have friends it's okay.' So then we all talked about the book at dinner. Reeny told us that Walter is the only boy who speaks Polish, but he has lots of friends and he's happy. Then she went on, nonstop, about Cory and Jenny and Bruce and Frederick and Tico and Oliver until we couldn't tell who was in a book and who was real. But, for her, the subject is friendship, plain and simple. Friendship is everything.”

“What did her parents make of Timothy and the mirror?”

“Steve said, 'Every once in a while, I look in the mirror when I'm shaving and I don't know myself. Especially after I've gone and done something mean to someone.' And then my daughter came up with this: Maybe Timothy wasn't even his real name. Maybe it was given to him by humans, and he didn't have mouse friends in the city to call him by his real name. So he had to get back to his own kind in order to know himself.”

“That was a pretty good discussion, Ettie.”

“Wait, it wasn't over. While we were cleaning up, Reeny said, 'That mouse has to dream himself a new name.' And then, as if it was part of the same subject, she said, 'Brown Baby is going to be in my story tomorrow, in my notebook.'”

“Who is Brown Baby?”

“Her imaginary playmate. He never leaves home! Why now? It feels funny knowing she's going to do this.”

“Maybe she'll change her mind,” I suggest.

“Could be. But my Reeny is someone who keeps thinking of new angles. You know what she told me at bedtime? She said, 'Grandma, you forgot something about Swimmy. He was the leader of red fish. Red fish. That means a black fish could be the leader of another color fish.”

from Geraldine

Cleaning up together after school, I say to Nisha, “I thought of a fancy way of describing what's happening to us this year. Narrative continuity. We have discovered another way of achieving narrative continuity.”

Nisha puts down the paint jar she is washing and smiles at me. “I think you once told me that play is narrative continuity.”

“That's exactly the point,” I reply. It feels as though we are marching to that same rhythm, as in play, or as you did when you heard the stories from the great epic every night. Now we are putting Leo Lionni to the test. Can he provide yet another vehicle for this instinctive need to concentrate for a long time on a connected set of images and dramatic events? Let's face it, what school usually does is continually interrupt any attempt on the part of children to recapture the highly focused intensity of play. What we need to do is help them – and ourselves – get back on track.”

Nisha pours out two cups of tea and motions me to the table she has just scrubbed. “You know what the Leo Lionni curriculum reminds me of?” she says. “It's like Hanuman's magic tail. It can grow longer and longer until it can wrap itself around everything and everybody.”