“The dusky glen laid cool hands on him. He rolled up the hems of his blue denim breeches and stepped with bare dirty feet into the shallow spring. His toes sunk into the sand. It oozed softly between them and over his bony ankles. The water was so cold that for a moment it burned his skin. Then it made a rippling sound, flowing past his pipe-stem legs, and was entirely delicious.” ~ Jody at the spring in Marjorie Rawlings’ The Yearling
Last night was a victory against my worries over our waning attention spans. I read The Yearling to Emma and Maggie for more than an hour. So engrossed were we that we could’ve kept going, but the spouse came up in his pajamas and announced the beginning of Mad Men on TV. My throat was as dry as toast, and he bribed me with a cup of tea, so I shut the book despite the girls’ groaning.
It’s delicious to be so absorbed in a story. I don’t like what I fear spending time on the computer or playing Wii or even watching the cooking channel might be doing to our brains. The twins know to ask their dad, when possible, to do these things, as I almost always say no. “Go outside!” I bark. But it’s 120 degrees in the shade, so they trudge in after ten minutes and go back to the tower of library books on their bedside table.
“We can’t read all day, Mama,” they’re starting to protest. (Right now they’re at the bottom of the tower of books. The day or two after a visit to the library is golden. Not so much a week later, when the books less carefully chosen are all that’s left in the pile.)
They can read all day—or close to it. Hours fly by like seconds for a child who becomes one with a book or a painting project or play-acting or hammering out a poem. I’m the one with the attention deficit disorder, and I haven’t touched the Wii since December 2008 when Luke, I mean Santa, brought that thing into our lives.
I catch myself in church, tapping my foot nervously, wanting desperately to use the margins of the bulletin to jot down the week’s grocery list. It’s such a temptation I’ve started making myself figure out what we need from the store on Saturday afternoons. And there’s nothing wrong with the sermons—it’s all me.
As I get older, more and more I think that good, careful attention to what is worthy takes practice. Mad Men is a cheap thrill (oh, the clothes!), but a three-part Masterpiece Theatre demands a certain kind of serious, Sunday night, let’s-get-down-to-business approach. The reward given by time spent with the latest BBC rendition of a Dickens novel or Rawling’s Pulitzer Prize-winning words is always greater. My spirit can soar with Beethoven—does it ever really take wing with the Beatles? But to soar it first has to settle into something not so quickly, not so easily reached for. I know this, and I still opt for the simpler, more accessible and less valuable. Sound-bites of film or prose or song. Marshmallows, these.
I know stuff made out of high fructose corn syrup is bad, very bad. I fall out of the habit of honey, and so I have to make an effort to like what I love.
It’s twilight—time to read The Yearling again. And be still, and think of nothing but what’s right in front of us, like the book’s young Jody, who can stare at the water in the spring all afternoon. Tragically, he loses that along with his childhood. I don’t want to grow up, not just yet.
Hey Laura!
We enjoyed seeing you over the weekend. I love your website! (See, I’m avoiding that ugly word, blog). You make me want to read The Yearling again.
I wish you the best with your writing, and for hanging in there until school starts back.