It was a few weeks after my friend, Fal, passed away, and I
was missing her. Driving along the highway, I saw a dark shape flying up from
the reservoir and over the highway. A
hawk, I thought, or a vulture. It was too early for osprey. I wish there were eagles around here. Fal
loved eagles. I watched it as I got closer.
The bird veered low over the highway—low enough to leave
absolutely no doubt. Pure white head and tail, strong yellow beak and legs—it
was a mature bald eagle. I screamed in disbelief. An eagle in Groton? NO WAY!!! This eagle was far beyond the Connecticut
River valley, far beyond normal eagle territory in Connecticut.
But it was there. I had seen it. And I might have missed it
if I hadn’t been thinking of Fal and her love of eagles.
I didn’t see the eagle again for two months—but I eagerly
searched the skies over the reservoir every time I passed by, and I looked a
bit more carefully at every hawk and vulture that flew overhead, no matter
where I was. This week I saw the eagle twice—once on its own, and once being
chased by the osprey who had returned to its territory for the spring. My son
got to see the two birds together, too—a rare treat, indeed!
The experience got me thinking about our expectations of the
world around us, and how often we might miss some pretty amazing things if we
operate only within the confines of our own thinking. “No eagles around here,”
was a constraint I’ve lived with for years—so sighting one made me think about
how we break free of those confines.
Our interactions with others are one way in which we expand
our expectations. Missing my eagle-loving friend opened me up to the
possibility of seeing eagles where I’d never seen them before, making me that
much more observant as I drove along the familiar I-95 corridor, priming me so
that I was ready to see a bird I may have passed by previously and dismissed without
really looking. Talking with friends and co-workers helps us expand our pool of
experiences and opens our realm of possibilities—we learn from the experiences
of others, and our view of the world changes because of them.
As a child, I grew up in a very sheltered and protective
family—my mother had lost two siblings and both her parents by the time she was
a teen, and she worried about losing us, too. The fact that my brother and
sister couldn’t really protect themselves from others made her fears even
greater. We were limited in our experiences and traveled very little. And yet,
I grew up with a sense of limitless wonder and possibility, and felt as if I
had traveled and met many people whose circumstances were far different from my
own. How was that possible? Through books, of course.
It began with Twenty
and Ten, by Claire Huchet Bishop, which I read when I was in second grade.
Twenty French school children hid ten Jewish refugees from the Nazis in World
War II in this book, and I was transported to another time; I met children who
were both alike and different from me, and my world grew larger. I was hooked. My
mother, a Japanese immigrant, was proud of my reading skills, and she promised
to buy me every book I wanted from the Scholastic Book Club flier that my
teacher sent home that year. I wanted almost all of them. A large box of books
arrived in the classroom the next month, and an enormous stack of books went
home with me. I read them all, re-read them, and promptly ordered more. During
my time in elementary school, Scholastic Book orders went home several times a
year, and my personal library grew and grew (my teachers must have loved the
bonus points!). There were times when the school would call my mother to pick
up the books, because I couldn’t carry them all home on the bus. To this day,
my mom still recalls the time our principal asked her, “Does Frances really
read all those books you buy for her?”
“Oh, yes,” Mom
replied truthfully. “She reads most of them three or four times each.”
“Three or four times? Each?” asked Mr. Butterfield, whose son was
in my grade. “I’m lucky if I can get my son to read his once!”
Those books lifted the limitations from my sheltered life. I
see the world today differently because they became part of my life’s experience. I
notice spiders spinning webs and clutching egg sacs; I watch for the promise of
secret gardens; I believe that doing good acts matters more than in whose name
you claim to do them; and I know that kindness is stronger than dominance. I am
primed to watch for magic and miracles, even (and especially) the ordinary
kind, such as seeing an eagle where you’ve never seen one before.
What does this mean to me as a writer? For most of my life, I've written only privately. Writing is what I do--it's how I sort out my feelings and process my world. It's an important act, but it wasn't until relatively recently that I began to think seriously about publication. I've had a few poems published, but it's my children's writing that I'm really working on now. And I wonder about my shift from writing privately, for my eyes only, to writing publicly.
Sometimes I chuckle at my efforts and wonder if striving towards publication of my
children’s books means I have: a) an unconscious need for recognition or approval b)
a sense of pompous authoritative knowledge c) a desire to rally against
mortality by leaving my words behind for the ages. But then I realize that it’s
more like d) a wish to give back to the world of literature what it gave to me:
A sense of wonder and joy. A sense of being recognized—the “hey, you feel that
way, too?” moment that reminds us that we’re all part of one human family. And
most of all, a sense of being primed to expect the unexpected--to notice and
appreciate the world around us and all the small gifts life bestows on us each
day.
Books do that for people. They’re like interactions with friends that help
us see a little more than we might ordinarily see on our own. That’s why I’ll
keep working on writing my novels and picture books, and why I'll strive to have them published. It's those interactions with books, and with friends, that change the way we see the world. Which is why, from now on, I’m always keeping an
eye out for eagles.
