Visual Grammar

Alison Jay has always created a visual story line in her books, and her beachside adventure Out of the Blue follows that established pattern. Her alphabet book (A B C) and counting book (1 2 3) teach youngest children these early concepts, and they also give them a plot line to follow that unfolds entirely through the illustrations. Out of the Blue, with no words, tells a complete story--two children make friends, take shelter from a storm, and rescue a giant octopus. It's liberating for children who are just learning to read because they can make up their own story.

Jay helps youngest children build confidence, as she reinforces all that they know: pages move from left to right, children can point out the heroes in the book who appear repeatedly (the boy and the girl) and they can follow the secondary characters down the beach. They do not need to decode words to "read" the story.

This spring at the Bank Street College of Education, Stephen Savage spoke about “visual grammar” using his book Where’s Walrus? to explain his idea. He spoke of the text and illustrations as “the harmony and melody of the song” and pointed to silent movies as “the original wordless books.” He explained the four components he believes are essential to books without words:

1)  The close-up
2)  Color/contrast
3)  Design/branding
4)  Pattern/repetition

You can see these elements most clearly in Where's Walrus?, but they also come into play in Alison Jay's work.

Children take in everything around them. They are sponges, absorbing how the world works long before they have words to explain what they're seeing. These elements, of which Savage spoke so eloquently, and which Jay also employs in her books, help children unlock the story within the book and also to use those strategies to make sense of the events in their own experiences.

Once You Learn How, You Never Forget

The beauty of Sarah Dessen’s analogy of bike-riding in Along for the Ride is that—up to this summer—Auden West has accomplished everything by thinking it through, and often, as Eli puts it, “overthinking.” But there is no way to intellectually master riding a bike, you have to just do it. The fact that Auden would, at age 18, be willing to learn to ride says more about her open-mindedness, and her willingness to change, than just about anything else could.

Everyone in my neighborhood knew how to ride a bike by age five. It was the way kids got to their friends’ houses, met up at the A&W on South Westnedge for hot dogs and root beer, and traveled to the baseball diamond. When we moved to Kalamazoo, Mich., I was seven. And I did not know how to ride a bike.

On the 4th of July, my Uncle Chris came to visit us in our new home. (He is my father’s brother, four years younger than my dad.) Uncle Chris probably learned of my dilemma in a conversation that went something like this:

“What are you doing inside? It’s a beautiful day. Why don’t you go ride your bike?”
Barely audible, I might have said, “I don’t know how.”
“What?” (booming voice) “You don’t know how to ride a bike? Well today you’re going to learn.”

Uncle Chris removed the training wheels from my bike and, just as Dessen describes Auden’s experience with Maggie as her “buddy,” he held onto the bike and ran alongside me, and then let go, “Keep pedaling!” he’d shout. Yes, I fell a number of times. But each time my uncle would say, “Let’s try again,” and I’d mount the bike and off we’d go, with him running alongside (“Keep pedaling!”). We did this again and again until, suddenly, I didn’t fall. I kept going. I pedaled and pedaled all the way to the end of our street and then turned right, and, aided by gravity, swiftly flew down a steep hill on a dead end street. I can still feel the wind rushing through my shoulder-length hair with the breakaway speed of it. And, because I did not yet know how to stop, I came to a soft landing smack in the middle of the Parker family’s peonies. They were very nice about it. The best part was, I now knew how to ride a bike. (I just had to practice braking.)

How sympathetic perfect Auden seems as she tries to convince Eli, a competitive stunt biker, that she’s pretty sure she learned how to ride when she was six. He knows there is no gray area. You either know how or you don’t. Once you do, your body intuitively shifts to stay upright, adjusting a little to the left or right, forward or backward, to maintain that balance. It’s not something you think about.

But Auden is willing to learn. As Adam, another biker in Dessen’s novel puts it, “What defines you isn’t how many times you crash, but the number of times you get back on the bike.” Once she masters the bike, we know Auden will be just fine.

Planting Seeds with My Father

Peter Brown’s The Curious Garden took me right back to my own first experiences with soil and seeds. My father is the gardener in our family. He is also a jock—quarterback on his high school football team, captain of the basketball team—with some pretty strongly held opinions on what’s manly and what’s not. So, as I look back, it’s pretty great that he was the one who taught my brother and me how to garden. Chip and I were probably four and eight (I’m older) when my father helped us plant seeds for the first time. It was the first full summer we spent at our new house on Lakeside Drive in Kalamazoo, Mich., and there were two symmetrical flower beds, each maybe 3' x 10' at the bottom of a steep hill (great for sledding in the winter), with a walkway between them. Dad gave Chip and me each a small section, and showed us how to plant the seeds a few inches apart, and how deep to press them into the earth. Each day, Chip and I would check on our seeds’ progress, and Dad coached us to be patient.

As a child, there is nothing quite like witnessing a seed that you’ve planted, with care and watering, growing into a flower or vegetable. It was one of the high points of teaching my second-grade science classes--that morning when the students filed in, went straight to the seeds they had carefully placed about an inch deep in the soil of a clear plastic cup (so they could watch the roots spread), and observed a furtive green tendril breaking the soil’s surface. Even though it’s one of the golden laws of nature, it can still feel like a miracle.

I don’t remember the specifics of the flowers my brother and I planted that summer as much as I remember Dad letting us into this secret world, showing us how he spent his hours weeding and watering and tending the garden. Ever after, I had newfound respect for his dedication: pruning the lilac trees outside my parents’ bedroom window, clipping the pine hedges by the front door, and cultivating the irises and lilies in the flower beds. Today, about all I can manage are three window boxes and three planters on our terrace in New York City. I have some yellow pansies and snapdragons, purple petunias, silver dust (leafy plants), and some dianthus (pictured at left) that are supposed to be annuals but are so deeply rooted in one of my planters that they’ve become perennials--with no thanks to me.

Recently, while strolling with my friend Cary past the beautifully maintained community garden that runs south from 96th Street in Manhattan’s Riverside Park, I started pointing out the impressive array of flowers the gardeners had cultivated. She asked me how I knew the names of so many of them. “My father,” I said. “He’s the gardener in our family.” I realized that he’d given me entry not only into this secret world of his, but its language, too.

Blueberry Summer

Every summer when we were small, my mother would take my brother, Chip, and me blueberry picking. If you shop for blueberries in August in almost any area of the country, you will find blueberries from Grand Haven, Michigan. (I’ve even bought Grand Haven blueberries at the Fairway market on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.) Reindeer’s farm in Grand Haven. That’s where we picked them. Sometimes we’d go with another family, but often we’d just wake up, discover it was a great day for blueberry picking, and we’d jump in the car, Mom, Chip and me. Rereading Bruce Degen's Jamberry took me right back to those childhood outings.

We’d search the blueberry bushes for the plumpest, juiciest-looking prospects, leaving the smaller ones to ripen for someone else. They took on a rich cornflower blue color when they were ripe, while the smaller ones had more of a purple tint to them. After awhile (and if you sampled one here or there), you got the hang of it. We’d each fill a bucket full of berries. It seemed like we would never run out of them. We washed them all and froze some. We’d have them on cereal, Mom would make blueberry pancakes and blueberry coffee cake. And the frozen ones would keep for a midwinter treat.

Years later, when Chip and I were in our teens, and our Grandma Petie (that’s my dad’s mom) was widowed, she’d come and stay with us summers, and she’d make blueberry pie from scratch. No one could make a pie crust like hers. She grew up in New England, and she’d exclaim over the quality of Michigan blueberries: “I’ve never seen berries so big! They look like huckleberries!” Every summer she’d seem delighted anew. She’d make the dough and let it rise, roll it out and lay it in the pie tin just so, pile on the blueberries with just a bit of sugar (no corn syrup), then overlay the top crust and gently crimp the sides of the pie, to close it up. She’d end with the ever-important fork holes in a neat pattern on the top.

I can’t tell you how many times I watched her do this, and yet I do not have a recipe for my Grandma Petie’s blueberry pie. I have collected recipes from other friends who are masters in the kitchen, and I’ve tried one or two, but none tastes like hers. Maybe this summer I’ll begin a pie-making quest, to try and recreate a crust as close as I can to hers. But in the meantime, I can still enjoy the blueberries, every small burst of flavor in my mouth taking me back to those carefree Michigan summers picking blueberries.