The Story So Far...

Take a second or six and think about your favorite story. Maybe it's one you read yesterday, or twenty years ago; maybe it's one that was read to you when you were young; maybe it's one that was written by Dr. Seuss. Or maybe it's the same as mine: "A Good Man Is Hard To Find," by Flannery O'Connor.

If you've never read Flannery O'Connor you should. She's a wonderful writer from the South who writes in the Southern Gothic style. Her prose is rich, almost humid, and her Roman Catholic themes examine morality and ethics. That's a horrible, English-Professor-thing to say and it does violence to both Ms. O'Connor and her art. Ms. O'Connor truly understood the Mystery and Manners of fiction.

In "A Good Man Is Hard To Find" a family starts out on a road trip and promptly gets lost. They run into The Misfit and by the end of the story Bailey, his wife, and his children, including a baby, have all been murdered by The Misfit's men. And while they're off being murdered, The Grandmother and The Misfit converse. When The Grandmother has her epiphany, The Misfit shoots her in the head.

"She would of been a good woman," The Misfit said, "if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life."

O'Connors story is about as close to the Truth as you can get about people, especially if by "good" you mean someone who lives the way the Roman Catholic Bible and the Roman Catholic Jesus prescribe. That is the power of story. It reveals Truth to us in understandable ways. A story can transport us to a rural, dusty road in the American South that is sun-baked, humid, and dripping with bugs. We can taste the grit and smell the cordite as we realize in an instant that we are exactly as grotesque as The Grandmother.

Dr. Seuss deals with the same themes, you know. Only he rhymes and tends to use trisyllabic meter. He also includes illustrations that are magical. Young minds love his world. They get it, instinctively, and it helps them understand our world of roads and taxes and bills…our world of cheap, mean people and the lazy.

The Magical Isn't Cheap

The first day of class I always asked two simple questions:

1. "How many of you read something every day for fun?"
2. "How many of you have parents who read something every day for fun?"

Every time four, sometimes five, hands went up for each question. The same hands for both questions. Those four, sometimes five, students were the "A" students. Every time. Year after year after year for 18 years.

Those illustrations in Dr. Seuss' books weren't for fun. They were placed in there to intentionally help children open their minds to possibilities. To consider a magical world. It's the same way Disney works. The kids who are surrounded by The Magical get it. They are the "A" students, and they go on to do worthwhile things that benefit everyone.

This is the reason walls in library reading rooms are painted in bold colors and depict scenes of Wonder. It's not just an attempt to spend money in a frivolous fashion. There are real cognitive benefits your children will receive.

Look, it's your children I'm talking about. I just have to live in this town with them, and we have two people on our city council who are cheap and mean. They are the reason the Mission Viejo City Hall looks like a debriefing center in the Soviet Union. Council Members and are bereft of imagination. They will never want to spend the money to help your children become one of those four, sometimes five, students who will get the "A."

Council Member is a little more interesting. He likes to read. He just didn't do the homework in time for the meeting. I hope you write to him at dleckness@cityofmissionviejo.org and encourage him to tour the reading room and ask some serious questions about the theories behind library reading rooms, and some serious questions about modern pricing as far as construction costs go.

Your kids will thank you and our community will benefit. They are our future, you know. Why short change them?