You guys,
At the end of the school year, at the end of each school day, my third grade teacher read to our class a book, Where The Red Fern Grows by Wilson Rawls. She only got through the first few chapters so when summer came I checked the book out of the library and read it on my own. I was sitting on my bed one night, after dinner but before bedtime, reading the final chapters. There were two dogs in the book, and at the end, both of them died. I sat on my bed sobbing when my dad came up the stairs and peeked his head in. “Are you okay?” he asked.
“Big Dan and Little Ann!” I cried. “They both died!”
“You’re crying like that… because of a book??” Dad asked.
I sniffled and nodded, now slightly embarrassed to be pulled from the world of my book into a conversation in real life with my dad. He wasn’t making fun of me. I think he was mostly surprised that a book had moved his fourth grader to tears. It was the moment I realized I could get completely transported to another world by words on pages.
The other day I picked up my kids from school and as we were walking back to the car I stopped and said, “Hey guys I have an idea.”
I knelt down at eye level, letting the excitement build.
“I was thinking we could go to the library!”
“Yay!!!!!” they cheered.
It’s so nice when my reality matches my expectations. My kids love going to the library.
The first thing we do when we walk in is go to the book return. There’s a stool at the children’s slot, so kids can stand on it and return their own books. I carry the bag over and they take turns, book-for-book, sliding it through. George slams it while Layla gently pushes it. Back and forth we go like this, each of them stepping up and back down again after each book.
Then we head into the children’s room. Layla rushes to the shelves and pulls one off a low shelf. “I want this one!” she announces. She barely looks at the cover before she’s decided. She does this with four books. George is slower to select his. Sometimes he heads right to the kid corner, where they have some communal toys to play with. If they both decide to play then I do my own search, reading each book I find from cover to cover, hoping the ending will live up to the promising first pages, though it seldom does.
Eventually we have a stack of almost ten books. “Should we see which ones we like?” I ask. “Yea!” they cheer. We head to a couch in the corner and they sit on either side of me, demanding in which order I read the books.
When it’s time to leave Layla scans the library card and I place all the books in a pile on the reader. Seven books. I pick her up so she can press “Done,” and “Print.” George allows this, because at the library’s exit he wants to press both buttons that open the heavy doors. Layla always obliges, because she can only see what’s in front of her, but I know that once we get to the doors she will cry because she wants to press a button, too.
Today, though, after we checked out the books and before we got to the exit, I made eye contact with the librarian. She was warm and motherly and asked if I knew about the summer reading program. “I don’t!” I said. She handed me two large white manila envelopes—one for each kid—and said, “If you read to your kids twenty minutes a day, you can log your days and once you reach a certain number they get a prize.”
“Oh wow,” I said.
“Have they picked out a prize today?”
My face was a question mark. We’d been coming to the library for a year, and we had our routine, but I knew nothing of the library’s offerings. I knew nothing about prizes. The kids’ faces were not question marks. They heard the word prize and were staring at the woman. She led us to the other side of a large desk, out of view, and there was a treasure chest on the floor. The kids stood there, staring at it. “Go ahead,” she said with a smile, and they did.
The summer after I read Where The Red Fern Grows there was a summer reading program as you entered middle school. I can’t remember how many books I read, maybe six. I only remember that one of them was longer, and it was a mystery, and I loved it. I felt good about my summer reading until I got to school and saw my peers’ lists. The thirty lines on their sheets were full of titles. They’d read short books. Baby books. But because they read so many they got a pizza party. It was the moment I learned that reading was a competition.
“You can do this every week,” the librarian continued as George and Layla dug through a heap of tiny, bright-colored toys in the chest. “If you read to your kids then they get a prize, and they always replenish the chest so there’s always new toys in there!”
Layla quickly picked out a little plastic pink kaleidoscope. She’d never seen one and didn’t know how to use it but it had a unicorn on the side. George took much longer to choose his. He dug and examined before finally picking the same toy as Layla in blue.
As we walked to the car, after Layla had collapsed on the floor because George pressed both buttons, and I brought her to a different door so she could press a button, and we paused at the outside benches for a snack because we couldn’t possibly make it home without sustenance, George said, “Mama, can you believe we got a PRIZE?”
“No, buddy, I can’t believe it,” I said.
“Will we get a prize next time, too?”
“Well,” I started, wishing I’d never made eye contact with the librarian, “the real prize is that we get to pick out any books we want and bring them home and read them.”
“Yea,” said George, turning the shiny blue plastic over in his hands, “but I like the toy prizes.”
When we got home from the library I dropped the white manila envelopes in the recycling bin.
—
Until next week,
Charlie
Loved this piece Charlie. Felt every emotion you had as a parent that you didn't describe.
Love this Charlie. Any chance to squash extrinsic motivators for something so intrinsically rewarding is such a win.