The Little Girl Who Could

“I think I can. I think I can,” said the little train that could. “Whoo, whoo!”

“I know I can. I know I can,” said the little girl and she did.

This is the story of a train, a girl, a book, and time.

Sometimes a person makes a dramatic life change in order to pursue a secret goal. Maybe the change was expected by people surrounding this person, but the reason leading up to it was not obvious. When we find out why somebody moves halfway around the planet or sells everything in order to live with very few material items, we often don’t get to ask what provoked the decision. The person has up and gone.

There was once a little girl who grew up. She had always wanted to live with, in, near books. In this sense, she has a lot in common with the girl in the story “On the Edge.” They could even have been sisters. The other story is available here, if you’re interested in it. If not, no problem. I just wanted to point out the fact that there are a lot of odd people in the world and that some of them aren’t all that dissimilar. The other girl’s name is Kay. The girl in this story is named Joy.

Joy drank words, kissed syllables, chewed vowels. All she wanted to do all day, every day, was one thing. She wanted to read more than anything else in the world. Not interested in basketball, cross-country skiing, or hurdle races. Not interested in learning to forage or mountain climbing. Reading kept her head on straight. Without it, she would never have made it to adulthood.

Joy also wanted to live in school, so she could go back and forth smoothly between one type of activity and another, which really meant going from one book to another. From school library to classroom to the hallways. Joy would have been so joyful if she could have put up a little cot in the school library. That would have been a glorious arrangement, but it never happened. Nobody would give her permission, so she quietly ducked her head and, somehow, kept moving forward.

She wanted to know both the questions and the answers. That was the problem. She believed that things written down were the truth. She liked the truth, and she liked facts. Those are not the same thing, by the way. Joy thought that was the way things worked, however, and that meant one thing. She would rather be reading. Give her a chance to do anything else in the world, and the choice would be the same. Reading.

When Joy ran out of grades to study, she was faced with a real conundrum and figured out that she would have to teach if she wanted to stay in school. She agreed to that. She had no choice. She was addicted. Like some people are addicted to tobacco, alcohol, or something worse. Nobody knew this, not really. Not the depth of the dependency, the desperation that surged within her when she was deprived of the hit or fix - call it what you like - that she regularly needed.  

And so Joy read literature and thought about literature. You may have noticed that we have skipped over the teaching career. There is a good reason for that: teaching was a disaster. Nobody knew, nobody could tell, because Joy - despite her name - was quite stoic. She was not prepared for all the parts of the profession of educator that had nothing to do with reading or books in any form. There were the homework assignments to correct, the exams to be written and corrected, the committee reports, the office hours. No time for reading, and inside Joy was shriveling away to nothing.

She thought about taking early retirement and saw it was a solution. Because it was so early, it wasn’t even retirement; she had to look for another job and she found it. Copy Editor was perfect. You almost always had to have a manuscript or book in your grasp and if you specialized, you could be reading mostly fiction. That was ideal. For a while.

Joy quit her job as copy editor for a major publisher after about a decade. She was making a lot of money. However, she didn’t need it all because there was nothing to spend it on. She needed to go somewhere else, but she wanted to make a clean break with both teaching and editing. She had noticed when the second phase of shriveling began, and was anxious not to waste any more time. She was old enough to know what she need to do, right?

“I’m going to… going to… have fun.” Very original.

Still, she left a good-sized house with a four-car garage. She was tired of driving a car, especially in the snow, so she left that as well. Donated her Toyota to a food bank or some community group in need of transportation. 

As part of her transition to another life, Joy learned to make artist’s books. She took quite a few workshops and learned a number of techniques for actually building books: intaglio, monoprinting, calligraphy, stitching pages and binding spines. For a while, it felt like a superpower, that assembling of books, that coloring of pages, that eco-dyeing of blank Arches TextWove paper.

Something was still missing, and she knew she wanted to publish her own book, her own work of fiction. She was not really an artist and though the books she had made were a farce. Then she made a decision, late one night when the rain was pounding and things were not tightly battened down, that the only way to get her own story out in the open and continue telling it was to detach herself from the world she knew. From the self she knew.

Thus Joy left not only house, garage, and car, but also nearly everything else she considered familiar. She chose a very opposite place, in many ways, knowing that, right or wrong, it was time to leave. 

She was ready to start living a very different life. She had to, if she were to survive. She was still shriveling and soon there would be nothing left inside her. Even the best book would not be able to resuscitate her.

Joy moved to where nobody else spoke her language and where she didn’t understand a word of what the people were saying. This was essential to her goal. It was another step toward unplugging the past. The weather was monotone, yet hard to define. Neither sunny nor cloudy, neither hot nor cold, nothing definite. As a result, almost any average clothing would be appropriate. None of this reflects on the site Joy had chosen, which was perfect and had more, much more to offer than pretty exteriors.

The new arrival found a one-room bedsit that was warm enough, and perfectly plain, as it should be. The point was to reach the bare minimum, then bring it all together. The point was to rebuild, not to try to patch up where previous decisions hadn’t worked, not try to whitewash what needed to be extracted.

The only drawback was the bad internet. Sometimes it was necessary to find books and other reading materials online. That especially held when one was living in a place where all communication, real-time, with human beings, was impossible when she arrived.

However, although Joy could not speak a word of the language in her new home (and she had redefined what ‘home’ meant in order to feel comfortable), she found that she was extremely adept at learning it. Almost overnight, she had developed enough linguistic expertise to go into a restaurant or any store and communicate exactly what she needed. With perfect grammar, no less. Another day, and she was stopping people on the streets to ask about museums, or movie theaters, or historic churches. This had not been her plan at all, because in a week it was as if she had been living there her entire life. She would get pulled down again, lose track of where she so wanted to go.

This was the problem, yes. As Joy walked happily along the streets, fitting right in after two weeks, she felt like she was going mad. She kept staring at everything. She kept watching. All the time she understood perfectly what she should not have been able to understand. It was, indeed, the perfect place.

She had come so far, left everything, in order to write her story, meaning (she thought) her novel. She had left the world of reading others’ work so she could begin making her own word-blocks, which is one of the ways she thought of books. As blocks of words you put your hands around, then inserted into yourself using the eyes as passageway. It was actually kind of gross. It also helps us understand how books, if not consumed, could become walls with no escape. You had to know what to do with them or you would not survive.

Except that now Joy saw clearly how what she was going to write could never be a novel. She didn’t really want to make something up when she was living in the middle of a place that was bending over backward to seduce her. Which it had. She had to fight hard against the impulse to grab everything that went by and study it as if she were going to be tested on it... she wanted to know nothing, but it was too late for that.

Starting at zero, like the point zero plaque in Madrid’s Plaza del Sol, Joy thought wistfully about how everything she learned from that moment on could be traced to the moment of setting foot in this new world. It meant her story was no longer important. She knew the book she must write would have to be a history book, but it would still be facilitated by her ability to read, her love for what lay between their pages. Now her assignment would be to read the landscape, the people, the buildings, the paths, everything that crossed her path. Everything would be new. Or not. Could she really expect to understand this place if she could only turn to its exterior for information?

“I don’t need to speak with people, since I’m here to observe and record. They are all new books for me.” She told herself that. Once again, she thought comparing people to books was original. Apparently she had never heard the old saw, “You can’t judge a book by its cover.” Poor Joy.

Yes, Joy was thinking rather irrationally, because we all know that nobody can really understand another culture, geography, or people without reading about them. Fortunately, the newcomer was able to shake off this mad idea of getting to a deep understanding by superficial observation. At last she came to understand that if she were to really concentrate on reading her surroundings, she simultaneously would be reading herself as she watched. 

Let’s put this another way: Joy was able look at a pair of women dressed a certain way and carrying out certain activities. As she recorded her observations, she was in fact recording what she herself knew how to observe. She could see things that she had learned to see. Everything else would be invisible. To fill in the gaps, she would have to keep studying, and (she rationalized) it would be all right to use her new language skills to get the answers she wanted. 

“What do you call that scarf?”

“Where do you live?”

“What subjects do children study in school?”

“What do you do for fun?”

Those were just a few examples. She could ask about favorite recipes, how much the average rent was, which holidays were the most important...

There was so much to learn, and it wasn’t just the vocabulary that had been missing when she came. The grammar required to communicate properly had been more than a mystery. Both had expanded at the speed of light and Joy felt dizzy. She felt it all like one feels lava running past, not burning, just displaying its strength and importance.

“Lava?” said Joy to herself. “I am losing my mind.”

And she was, pretty much. The point here is that you can’t erase yourself in order to write your story. You can’t leave it all behind and expect to pick it up again someplace new. You can’t land in the middle of somewhere and expect that place to bare its soul to you.

Moral of the Story #1:

You can’t ever cut all the ties that bind, because you will start flailing. You will regret having gone to the other side in search of greener grass. You will have no solid ground to stand on. 

Moral of the Story #2:

You should never try to let go of the thread that is guiding you through the labyrinth. If you do, and run into the Minotaur, don’t blame it on Ariadne. 

Moral of the Story #3:

Ask yourself if Joy did the right thing. Well, that’s not really a moral, but ask yourself anyway.

Epilogue:

At the beginning, we mentioned a train and a little girl. We mentioned a book and time as well. To understand this story, you will have to decide if the girl was as successful as the train and why. You will also have to identify the book being referenced. You should also ask, maybe using Tina Turner’s song for inspiration:

“What’s time got to do with it?”

We’ll wait.