My new book, The Other Side of the Island is now in stores.  I can’t help beaming as I see it on the new book rack at Curious George in Harvard Square, at Porter Square Books, and in the Concord Bookshop.  It’s a crowded marketplace for new books, and a difficult time for hard covers.  Still, the books look so fresh and shiny–I try to take a moment to enjoy publication.

A vague idea scribbled in a notebook, countless drafts marked up in purple, days and weeks of frustration and also joy–and now they’re all bound up in a real book in libraries and stores, and I hope in the hands of children and parents.

A lovely review running tomorrow in The Washington Post Book World is like the icing on the cake. In an age when editors apportion less and less space for book critics, writers are grateful to be reviewed at all–and to receive a thoughtful detailed review . . . ahhh, cause for celebration.

This week I’ve been riding a new bicycle–my first in many years.  I saw the bike on sale at Broadway Bicycle School and couldn’t resist.  It’s a Dutch ladies’ open frame bike, big and red, 3 speed, a real city bike with a bell.  You sit up when you ride–none of that crouching down and pretending you’re racing.  Riding this bike is like riding a horse.  What fun to ride along the river.  I’ve had some compliments on my new red 3 speed steed.  I suppose it should tell me something that my 70 year old neighbor thinks a bicycle like mine would be perfect for his wife.  Well, my bicycle might not be the fastest or most ergonomic, but it’s got an old fashioned style all its own.

Today The Globe published the last of my six essays.  It was fun hearing from neighbors and friends that they read me at breakfast. 

I called my last essay Warm World, but the newspaper titled it rather dramatically:  Dark Dreams of Global Warming.  It’s about one of the inspirations for my new book, The Other Side of the Island.

Here it is:

My twelve year old supports Barack Obama, and after the
Democratic National Convention, I expected euphoria, but he surprised me.   “Actually,” he said, “Schwarzenegger is the
one I really want for president.”

“What? 
You want the Terminator in the Oval Office?”

“Who’s the
Terminator?” my son asked. 
“Schwarzenegger’s good on the environment, and that’s my number one
issue.  It doesn’t really matter as much
for you, because you’ll be dead,” he explained, “but I’m going to have to live
through global warming, and I’m afraid by the time I can vote, it will be too
late.”

My son’s
fatalism amazes me, but he’s not alone in worrying that time is running
out.  Recently, one of my friends told me
that her son can’t sleep because he is so anxious about global warming.  Other friends try to shield their children
from watching storms on the evening news. 
Was it so long ago that weather was the safe subject for conversations?  For our children the forecast evokes the
horsemen of the apocalypse:  Conquest,
War, Famine, and Death.. It’s not clear to me that global warming causes every
natural disaster, but in a child’s mind, climate change and horrific weather go
together.  Icebergs are melting.  The sea level is rising.  Entire island chains are disappearing.  Tsunamis wipe out villages.

“I take out
books on global warming from the library,” my friend told me, “and I always
turn to the back and show my son the section where it says how you can help.  But he
doesn’t find any of the suggestions comforting.

No, our
children are not easily comforted, and our attempts:  Reduce,
recycle and reuse! don’t speak to their profound fear.  During the Cold War, children worried about
nuclear annihilation.  Today they believe
we will destroy the planet before we have a chance to destroy each other.   I’m impressed by the time frame of their
nightmares.  My son is convinced that in
his lifetime he’ll see the world thawed, warmed, and thoroughly cooked. 

Where does
environmental awareness come from?  The
internet, Al Gore’s, An Inconvenient
Truth, lessons about ecology at school. 
Yes, all of these play their part, and I’m proud of my children for
knowing and caring about the planet.  But
where does environmental anxiety come from? 
That’s a more complicated question. 
Storms and sudden earthquakes are terrifying in themselves, but I think
it’s the aftermath that really frightens children.  Tsunamis drown families in Indonesia.  Classrooms bury students in China.  Levies fail. 
The evacuation plan doesn’t work. Billions in federal funds cannot fix
New Orleans, where the Mayor admitted to citizens that there were no safeguards
in place against Hurricane Gustav. 
Apparently the best recourse for natural disaster is to run for our
lives.  Our government proves ill prepared.  The junta in Myanmar looks downright
evil–refusing international aid, and starving its own citizens.  Watching the resulting chaos erodes our
children’s belief that adults will protect them.

What’s a
parent to do?  Ironically, even as we
become fastidious on the micro-level with seat belts, and supervised play, we
can’t secure the climate or supervise the planet.  Some parents become politically active.  Some join their children in consciousness
raising bike rides.   As for me, I began
writing a dystopian novel imagining the world after global warming, and how
children might survive.   I told my son
the book was just an experiment, and he couldn’t tell anyone that I was writing
it.  He said, “We need a code.  I’ll call the book laundry.”  Occasionally, over the next year, he’d ask
me, “How’s the laundry coming?”

I always
forgot the code. “We’re behind again  Why
do you ask?  Are you out of clean
clothes?”

“No, the laundry,” he repeated, and I realized he
meant my book–his book.

Now, if I
were also logging miles on a major bicycle trek, and composting, and advocating
for reduced emissions, I’d do more good. 
But my son knows that I’m a lousy biker. 
Anxious about his anxiety,  I
reacted like Astrophil in Sir Philip Sidney’s sonnet. “Biting my truant pen,
beating myself for spite / Fool, said my Muse to me, look in thy heart and
write.”

For this week’s Globe essay, I wrote a back to school piece.  My kids go back on Wednesday–thank goodness!  Sometimes at this time of year I feel as though I need my kids to be in school so that I’d have time to buy school clothes, supplies, lunch food and do all the things necessary to get them ready for school.  Yes, I could have written a whole essay on that subject as well!  But here is the piece I wrote–which is about the extremely careful language teachers use in and out of the classroom:

            Back to
School sales, first day traffic jams, fresh notebooks, and curriculum nights
when parents squeeze themselves into miniature chairs to hear about first
grade.  Some things never change.  What does change, to my ear, is the lingo
educators use–language that seems to grow more circumspect each year.  I already knew that my children were unique,
but I understand now that each learns differently to develop and extend
emergent skills.  I had always
characterized my children’s behavior as good, decent, or atrocious.  Their teachers never use these words, but
speak about challenges, ownership, and community. 

            I like this
sensitivity to language.  Just as we’ve
banned corporal punishment from the classroom, we’ve banned verbal abuse.  No self-respecting teacher screams, “You
idiots–what were you thinking?” And it’s certainly beyond the pale to call
students’ questions stupid, or tell them to shut the hell up when they talk in
class.  Careful word choice creates an
atmosphere of respect in the classroom, and even outside, where students
unconsciously emulate their instructors. 
In the heat of battle on the playground, one child screams at another,
“That’s not okay!”  In the midst of a
tantrum over ice cream I refused to purchase, my six year old sobs to me, “I’m
very disappointed with you.”  Children
learn a vocabulary of courtesy, as they would any other language, by ear. 

            Sometimes,
however, I sense a nervousness on the part of educators–an unwillingness to
speak directly.  In the delicate patois
of the classroom, I strain to figure out what’s going on.  A sensitive teacher will ask to speak to me
for a moment after school, and begin with a preamble about my daughter’s many
strengths.  Only after long discussion of
her temperament and spirited character, do I begin to realize that something
happened that day.  There’s been an
incident, but I can’t figure out what it was. 
In the past, a teacher might have begun, “Your daughter got into a fight
today.”  Now I have to press for details
of the case.  I brace myself and
interrupt, “Just tell me–what did she do?” 
If teachers tread carefully in conversation, elementary school report
cards read like runes.  Gradually she is developing greater
sensitivity to others’ personal space . . . 
An emergent reader, he has made great strides with books that interest
him.  I appreciate the emphasis on
the positive and the emergent, but really–how is my kid doing? 

            Perhaps
schools fear lawsuits.  What I see as
circumlocutions might well serve a legal purpose:  educational fine print–the clauses necessary
to qualify and mediate every interaction in the partnership between school and
home.   Tell me my child is evil or stupid,
and that could be actionable.  Tell me my
child is special, and that’s the path to communication, teamwork, and extra
support.  The trouble is that specialness
is so widespread.  As Dash puts it in The Incredibles: saying everybody’s
special “is another way of saying nobody is.” 
And so it’s hard to discern, these days, between garden variety special,
and special meaning gifted, and special as a euphemism for taboo terms like big
trouble.  In a world where all the
children are above average, we still make judgments, we still evaluate skills
and aptitudes, but we pretend we don’t.  When pressed, we develop an elaborate
apologetics about test scores.  We talk
about the bigger picture; we take the longer view, and we abhor words like
success or failure. 

            I admit,
sometimes I long for straight talk and concrete details, less developmental
context, and more specific information about what teachers expect and whether
they are getting it.  But while I mock
educational euphemisms, I find I can’t resist them.  Scheduling an appointment for my son’s eye
exam, I heard a nurse say, “Okay.  He
failed his initial screening?”

            “He did not
fail!” I retorted, indignant.  “He just
didn’t do as well as he could have . . .”  I trailed off, and finished the mantra
silently:  And with support, he’ll see just fine.  Yes, as we used to say in the old days:  my child needed glasses.