Never again, I promised myself when I checked in at the hotel (er, motel). Never again would I do this tour of smalltown schools, where the accommodations included such amenities as duct tape on the Barcalounger and a Magic Fingers device on the bedside table. My resolution lasted longer than usual: almost a full day. This time, it crumbled before a fourth grader named John.
Children's authors visit schools, and I am no exception. On one hand, these school visits are all the same—the talks and schools tend to blur into one amorphous mass. But on the other, I am increasingly moved by individual children. And it's the smalltown and rural kids that grip me hardest.
There are many benefits to smalltown or country living. A variety of cultural opportunities is not one of them. If you're a budding artist or intellectual and you live in a city, your parents will likely take you to concerts, museums, and the theater. You'll browse well-stocked libraries and bookstores, and can sign up for after-school classes in almost any discipline; if you show early promise, you may have access to some of the best teachers anywhere.
But if you live in a small town, the options are limited—and if you are a farm kid, they're probably nonexistent. If you have chores to do, and no activity buses that go the 10 miles out to your farm, you probably can't even take advantage of the few after-school offerings.
Enter the kids who grab me. In almost every small town there are one or two children I recognize, so to speak. There is an intensity to these kids that I don't see in their counterparts in the city. They listen with their whole being. Their attention never flags. They don't wriggle.
On my last tour, a thin boy caught my attention. He sat still, but with such restrained emotion that I almost looked for the cords that held him down. At the end of my talk, his hand shot up. "This isn't a question," he said, "but I love to read." Later, in the hall, he pulled my sleeve. "I've read all the Harry Potters," he said, "and I'm finishing Lord of the Rings." He looked at me as if this somehow said everything. He looked at me as if he wanted me to understand who he was.
I asked the librarian about him, and she told me John struggled in school. Too lost in his imagination to pay attention to teachers, he often blurted out things that seemed odd; his mind had gone so far ahead of everyone else's that he was out of sync. But for the hour of my talk, John's attention never drifted. He took in what I was saying about the creative life as if it were meat and drink.
Last year, the standout was a third-grader named Maria. She paired an abrupt manner and gravelly voice with the face of an angel, and she had no time for small talk. She found me an hour after my presentation and thrust a small, crookedly stapled booklet into my hand. "Here," she said hoarsely, and disappeared.
It was a story about the adventures of a sewer rat. She had dashed it off on lined paper after my talk. She was no more interested in presentation than she was in social skills (the edges looked as if they had been hacked with a machete), but her drawings were unusually expressive, and her writing was delightful.
And then there was Sam—the brightest boy in school, according to his librarian—whose career goal was to be a truck driver. It was the most prestigious job in his neighborhood, and he was aiming high. But after my talk, he raised his hand. "How do you get to New York?" he asked. "I mean, someone like me?"
If you are a child, the world you know seems like the whole world. If you are a child in a smalltown or rural environment, you might have only a dim sense of the opportunities that are out there, beyond the confined space of your familiar life. Sometimes it takes a visitor from that outside world to make those opportunities seem real, and possible, and for you. When a window is opened, a longer view is revealed; for some kids, one glimpse of a larger world makes all the difference.
This smalltown circuit isn't an easy tour. The pace is tough, the pay scant, and lunches are from the school cafeteria. I can almost guarantee that at least once each time, I will tell myself, "never again."
But I can also guarantee that, at least once, I will remember exactly why I said yes.
Lynne Jonell is the author of Emmy & the Home for Troubled Girls (Holt) which pubbed in paperback last month; the forthcoming Hamster Magic (Random House); and The Secret of Zoom, recently purchased by President Obama for his daughters.
