At Work in the Garden of the Mind

I’m at work in the garden and thinking about Price McLemore.

I met him years ago -- a cotton farmer in Montgomery County, Alabama, one of the few left in the area at the time.   He loved the feel of the soil, the rhythms of the seasons, and the notion that the land he farmed had the history of his family tied up in it.

One Spring day, in the little outbuilding he called an office, he showed me his journal.  It was a huge, leather-bound ledger that was the written history of the McLemore farm.  It went back a hundred years to the time before the Civil War.  Every McLemore who had farmed the land had made an entry in the journal every day of the cotton-growing season every year.  They started at planting time and went through harvest.  It was a matter of honor that no McLemore missed an entry.

Each recorded faithfully what the weather was like on a particular day, how the crop was growing, the rainfall, the battle against the boll weevil.  Over the span of time, the McLemores found that growing seasons repeated themselves if you recorded enough of them.  No matter what the present year was like, you could probably find a year somewhere in the past that resembled it.  And that could help you plan on how to spray and fertilize and when to hire workers to pick the cotton.

It amounted to a crude science, but it went far beyond that.  It said to me that man and nature are one, each with its seasons, repeating themselves in universal timelessness.  Birth and death, seedtime and harvest.  What goes around, comes around.  There’s a comfort and a hopefulness in that.

As a writer, I’ve come to think of my life as a journal, in which I have recorded every aspect of my being.  Whether I’ve written things down as they occurred or not, they’re all there – everything I’ve experienced, every thought or idea I’ve had, everything I’ve read, every place I’ve been, every person I’ve encountered.  Seeds planted, waiting to spring forth later as fruits of my imagination, just when I need them for whatever story I’m working on at the moment.

To have a proper garden, you have to tend to it – plant those seeds and nurture them through their growing time.  The best way I do that is by reading.  When I read a story, it opens my imagination and makes way for a seed for later harvest.  And that’s why I’m so passionate about young people using the summer for reading time, reading things just for fun, as I did when I was a boy.  I’ve been enjoying the harvest all my life.

So I’m working in the garden, literally and figuratively, tending the okra and squash, the cucumbers and onions, the peppers and herbs.  Thinking about young people and their imaginations, and about Price McLemore and about rhythms of life.  And I feel a little better about the world for all that.

The Slow Death of Reading

When our daughters were very small, we sat them in our laps and started reading.  A captive audience, to be sure, but we found before long that we were the captives in one of the most treasured times we had with them.

Our favorite book in those early years was The Three Little Kittens.   You probably know the lilting rhyme by heart: “The Three Little Kittens, they Lost Their Mittens…”  We read that one book over and over and over.  The girls loved to hear it read and would often bring it to us, ready to settle in.  They soon learned the text by heart.  Paulette and I would occasionally change a word, just for fun.  “The Three Little Kittens, they Lost Their Asparagus…”  “No, no!” the girls would cry, “it’s MITTENS!  Silly Daddy.”

Of course, we soon graduated to a much broader variety of books, but we kept coming back to Kitten Trio until the book literally fell apart.  It was not until years later that we saw the famous quote from award-winning children’s author Emilie Buchwald:

I’ve been thinking about all that as I hear more and more alarming news about reading (or rather, lack of it) in our modern world. 

The Washington Post reports on new studies by neuroscientists about how our brains process information.  Researchers are finding that we spend an increasing amount of time (five hours a day and climbing) on electronic devices – smart phones, laptops, I-pads, etc. – and that we are mostly skimming and scanning, rushing through text to find something that catches our interest.  Conversely, we are spending less and less time with more in-depth reading:  books, and the sort.  We are re-wiring our brains to dash pell-mell through the torrent of online information.  We cover more ground, but we absorb less.  We see it, but we don’t really get it.  Comprehension, it turns out, seems better when we read from paper. 

This is especially true for children, whose brains are developing patterns that will last a lifetime.  They are drawn to adults’ electronic devices and they learn to skim and scan.  Deep reading skills don’t get the nurturing they need.  From books.

There’s more bad news from a couple of other recent surveys:

33% of high school graduates never read another book the rest of their lives.

42% of college graduates never read another book after college.

80% of U.S. families did not buy or read a book last year.

In 1984, only 8% of 13-year-olds said they hardly ever or never read for pleasure; today, 22% of 13-year-olds say that.

That’s all depressing news.  We live in a complex, fast-moving world and the problems we have to tackle, and hopefully solve, require deep, creative thought.  We adults are passing those problems on to new generations, but we’re not giving them the tools they need – comprehension, reason, the ability to make sense of complicated ideas.  They won’t find the answers flipping madly through e-mails and social media.  Those may be good tools, but they aren’t the essential ones.

If I had one wish for parents, it would be that we would read – a lot – to our children, and start as soon as they’re able to hold their heads up.  My mother did that for me, and gave me the gift of a fertile imagination, which has served me richly in a long love affair with words.

If there’s a kid near you – your own or someone else’s – grab the kid and a book, snuggle up, and start reading.  That’s true for parents, grandparents, friends, neighbors, even older siblings.  Kids are mimics, and when we read to them, we let them know that reading is important and rewarding.  Once that sinks in, they’re hooked, and they can’t wait to learn to read themselves.  If you can find one, I suggest a copy of The Three Little Kittens to start with.  The asparagus thing, that’s optional.