Sidewalk Flowers: An Illustrated Ode to Presence and the Everyday Art of Noticing in a Culture of Productivity and Distraction

A gentle wordless celebration of the true material of aliveness.

“How we spend our days, of course, is how we spend our lives,” Annie Dillard wrote in her magnificent defense of living with presence. But in our age of productivity, we spend our days running away from boredom, never mind its creative and spiritual benefits, and toward maximum efficiency. Under the tyranny of multitasking, the unitasking necessary for the art of noticing has been exiled from our daily lives. And yet, as we grow increasingly disillusioned with the notion of “work/life balance,” something in our modern souls is aching for the resuscitation of this dying capacity for presence. That capacity is especially essential in parenting, where the cultural trope of the device-distracted parent is an increasingly disquieting pandemic.

Half a century after Ruth Krauss wrote, and Maurice Sendak illustrated, one of the loveliest lines in the history of children’s books — “Everybody should be quiet near a little stream and listen.” — poet JonArno Lawson and illustrator Sydney Smith team up on a magnificent modern manifesto for the everyday art of noticing in a culture that rips the soul asunder with the dual demands of distraction and efficiency.

Sidewalk Flowers (public library) tells the wordless story of a little girl on her way home with her device-distracted father, a contemporary Little Red Riding Hood walking through the urban forest. Along the way, she collects wildflowers and leaves them as silent gifts for her fellow participants in this pulsating mystery we call life — the homeless man sleeping on a park bench, the sparrow having completed its earthly hours, the neighbor’s dog and, finally, her mother’s and brothers’ hair.

The flowers become at once an act of noticing and a gift of being noticed, a sacred bestowing of attention with which the child beckons her father’s absentee mind back to mindful presence.

In the final scene, the little girl tucks a wildflower behind her ear, in the same gesture with which her father holds his device, and looks up to the sky — a subtle, lyrical reminder that we each have a choice in what to hold to our ear and our mind’s eye: a flower or a phone.

Sidewalk Flowers, which is immeasurably wonderful in its analog totality, comes from Canadian independent children’s-book publisher Groundwood Books — creators of the intelligent and imaginative Once Upon a Northern Night, What There Is Before There Is Anything There, and Morris Micklewhite and the Tangerine Dress.

Illustrations courtesy of Groundwood Books; photographs my own.

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When I Have a Little Girl / When I Have a Little Boy: A Vintage Illustrated Daydream about Life without Unimaginative Rules

“She can pet any dog she likes without asking if it’s friendly. (She’ll know. I always do.)”

The recent rediscovery of Lincoln Steffens’s magnificent 1925 meditation on the delights of gender-blind parenting reminded me of the like-spirited gem When I Have a Little Girl / When I Have a Little Boy (public library) — a magnificent collaboration between children’s book legend Charlotte Zolotow (June 26, 1915–November 19, 2013), whom the greatest patron saint of modern childhood once aptly described as “a brilliant and sensitive creative person,” and artist Hilary Knight (b. November 1, 1926), best known for illustrating the widely and wildly beloved Eloise series.

Originally published in the late 1960s as two separate boy/girl versions, the story was eventually combined into a charming “flip-flop book” in 1988 — reading from one end tells the story of a little girl (reminiscent of the lovably mischievous Eloise) daydreaming of the unconventional mother she’d be when she has a little girl of her own; turning the book upside-down and reading from the other end tells the parallel story of a little boy daydreaming of being an equally unconventional father to his future little boy.

The story tickles every child’s dream of escaping the silly rules imposed by overcautious and unimaginative adults, calling to mind young Mark Twain’s irreverent advice to little girls and offering a positive counterpoint to Toni Morrison’s dark take on the things kids are made to do, with a touch of Emily Hughes’s wonderful Wild.

Above all, it celebrates children’s inherent intelligence, living up to E.B. White’s famous proclamation that “anyone who writes down to children is simply wasting his time” — Zolotow writes up to them, as she always did, and Knight elevates the writing even further, as he always does.

Tucked into the cheekiness is also the subtle acknowledgement that these rules are sometimes in place to benefit the adults rather than the child — like the practice, always unfair to kids and familiar to those who have grown up in complicated families, of asking children to keep grownups’ secrets.

When I have a little girl, all the rules will be different.

And I will never say to her, “When you are a mother you will understand why all these rules are necessary.”

Complement When I Have a Little Girl / When I Have a Little Boy with Zolotow’s charming reverse-psychology ode to friendship, The Hating Book, then see Lena Dunham’s fantastic documentary about Knight. Here is a taste:

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An Illustrated Celebration of the Many Things Home Can Mean

A sweet reminder that despite our different walks of life, we have in common a shared longing to belong.

“Home,” Maya Angelou wrote in her magnificent meditation on belonging and (not) growing up, “is that youthful region where a child is the only real living inhabitant.” Indeed, it seems that only for children, with their purity of feeling and their ability to “mediate the ideal and the real,” does the Venn diagram of home and house integrate into one fully overlapping circle. In adulthood, the circles drift further and further apart as we begin to project our conflicted dream-home ideals onto our real houses.

In the impossibly wonderful Home (public library), illustrator and children’s book author Carson Ellis presents an imaginative taxonomy of houses and a celebration of the wildly different kinds of people who call them home.

What emerges is a playful and tender reminder that however different our walks of life — what contrast there is between the Slovakian duchess’s mansion and the Kenyan blacksmith’s shack, between the babushka’s kitchen and the artist’s studio! — we are united by our deep desire for a place to call home.

After all, we begin belonging to his world — to borrow Mary Oliver’s wonderful phrase — first by rooting ourselves into it; by staking out a little corner of it to call our very own. It need not have walls or a roof — it can be a tour bus, or even a shoe, as Ellis’s illustrated taxonomy assures — but only from that place of safety can we reach out to connect, to understand one another, and to begin belonging together.

Ellis guides the reader to and through this common thread of belonging by placing little semi-hidden markers of communion and continuity — the same house plant graces multiple homes; a pigeon visits the young girl in Brooklyn and then perches on the Russian babushka’s window; the icon that hangs on the wall of the babushka’s kitchen is seen, several pages later, on the wall of the artist’s studio. (The artist, endearingly enough, is Ellis herself.)

Sprinkled amid the very real homes of very real people from different cultures are the whimsical abodes familiar from beloved tales — right next to the Japanese businessman is the Norse god, proudly standing before his magical palace, and a giant upside-down cup calls to mind Leonard Weisgard’s magnificent mid-century illustrations for Alice in Wonderland.

Home is the kind of book that legendary editor Ursula Nordstrom, perhaps the greatest patron saint of childhood who ever lived, might say “can’t help but make any child warmed and attended to and considered.” Complement it with the best children’s books of the past year.

Illustrations © 2015 by Carson Ellis courtesy of Candlewick Press. Photographs my own.

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A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to School: A Charming Catalog of Excuses and an Allegory for How Human Imagination Works

A playful parable about the stories we tell to avoid being wrong and the combinatorial nature of human creativity.

Psychologists and behavioral economists now know that there is a strong positive correlation between creativity and dishonesty — the more intelligent and imaginative we are, the better we’re able to rationalize our misconduct. And since children’s minds reveal so much about how the human imagination develops, both psychological theory and parental practice confirm that kids come up with the most fanciful excuses for why they did those mischievous things they knew they weren’t supposed to do.

In A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to School (public library), celebrated children’s book author Davide Cali and French illustrator Benjamin Chaud weave a playful parable of this childhood tendency to come up with excuses so fantastical that they become charming stories in their own right — a crucible of creativity and a sandbox for the young mind to play with the building blocks of storytelling.

One morning, the little boy is late to school and when his teacher inquires about the reason for his tardiness, he proceeds to offer a litany of imaginative excuses. Giant ants ate his breakfast! Evil ninjas ambushed him on the way to the bus stop! A massive ape mistook the school bus for a banana! His uncle’s time machine misfired and sent him back to the dominion of dinosaurs!

There are “scary majorettes,” “an unusually large spiderweb,” an encounter with Bigfoot and Yeti, and a call from the president who demanded the boy’s “champion chess skills” in helping to “save the planet from an alien invasion.”

Underpinning the delightful story, with its acrobatics of the imagination and its disarming illustrations, is a subtle testament to the combinatorial nature of creativity — we create our “own” ideas by combining countless fragments of existing ones, of impressions and influences and bits of information, into novel combinations. Ursula K. Le Guin knew this when she considered where great ideas come from, as did Mark Twain when he contemplated originality in a letter to Helen Keller, asserting that “substantially all ideas are second-hand, consciously and unconsciously drawn from a million outside sources.”

The little boy’s tales are a testament to this machinery of ideation — many of them borrow subtle elements or entire plot lines from beloved fairy tales (there is the Little Red Riding Hood, beseeching him to help find her grandmother), pop culture tropes (a Godzilla-like ape seizes the school bus), and classic children’s stories (he grows tiny, then huge, à la Alice in Wonderland).

When the little boy is finished relaying his imaginative series of unfortunate events and his teacher inquires whether those fanciful misadventures were the reason for his tardiness, we get to the comically unremarkable truth — for truth, after all, is always unremarkable, and that is what makes it true.

In the final page, as the teacher perches over the boy in skeptical disapprobation of his excuses and their validity, a friendly dinosaur from the faulty avuncular time machine pokes its head through the classroom window — a gentle and generous gesture which seems to assure the young reader that the child’s experience is always real and valid, even if grownups don’t believe it is true.

One can’t help but think of Philip K. Dick’s definition of reality as “that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away” — what we believe, after all, is the only reality we’ll ever know, and who can agree on this fluctuating fiction we call Truth anyway?

Complement the impossibly delightful A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to School with another wonderful take on reconciling different realities, Peter Brown’s My Teacher Is a Monster! (No, I Am Not.)

Illustrations courtesy of Chronicle; book photographs my own

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