Why I Don't Write Children's Literature

  I imagined the couch and the small blanket that I would embrace like a lover.

  “A couple of things,” I answered, after some hesitation. Please hurry, I begged silently. Please just go. “Your keys are on the counter. Can you remember to pick up a six-pack for me? Heineken, por favor.”

  I ventured into our bedroom, opened the closet, and considered which sweater to wear while I napped. How about the red one? I asked myself. Or the colorful one that resembles a Frank Stella painting — or both, one on top of the other? The layered look is back in, right?

  My wife didn’t ask what I meant by “a couple of things.” She was suddenly in a hurry. Back in the kitchen, I followed her like a cat. She opened the pantry and brought out some shopping bags. “It can wait,” she said.

  “What can wait?” Was she already planning dinner?

  “It’s a mess. Get rid of the potatoes, will you?”

  She meant the pantry. And the bag of potatoes with wormy roots oozing from their skins. I picked up the potatoes and followed my wife to the front door, where I slipped into my shoes. The potatoes, minus the plastic bag, were headed to the green bin.

  My wife didn’t kiss me goodbye, but she did say, “You look nice in your sweater.” I was wearing the red one, with all of its buttons in the proper holes. I tossed the potatoes into the green bin as her pickup truck pulled out of the driveway. Then she was gone. I waved but she didn’t see me. I returned to the front door, parked my shoes on the stoop — we’re a shoeless household — and went inside.

  I was so eager for her to leave because I was embarrassed. I did not want her to think of her hubby of thirty-eight years napping at 10:23 a.m., the present time according to our clocks — microwave clock, stereo clock, wall clock, computer clock, even my tired old man of a wristwatch. Napping should be a private matter, especially so early in the morning. At sixty-two, I’m still spry. But at seventy, I could be that geezer gripping a magazine as he nods off with his mouth open. Will my hands be peppered and my nostrils a display of unsightly foliage?

  After that thought, I encouraged myself either to be productive, or to educate myself in fields far from the familiar — to learn about my car’s motor, for God’s sake. And what was wrong with woodworking? I became angry at myself for not buying a set of toothy saws at a yard sale. I could have learned to make a three-legged stool, then moved on to more ambitious projects such as an armoire. On the domestic scene, I could hoe a flowerbed or vacuum under the bed, the flexible hose choking on Kleenex. And the car needed a good scrubbing behind the ears — the side mirrors, I mean.

  With my nap temporarily on hold, I got a phone call from my former literary agent. She briefed me on a contractual point that was meaningless to me — ten minutes about audio rights in Australia. Oh, please, I begged. Let the Australians have my work for free. I have nothing against kangaroos.

  I hung up, still possessing the ambition to nap. My inner self was full of yawns. Guiltlessly, I crawled onto the couch and securely patted a blanket, knitted by our daughter, around my legs. That’s nice, I sighed, and closed my eyes. I folded my arms across my chest, turned my head left, then right — comfy, comfy, get comfy. I turned onto my side, bringing my hands near my face, as if in prayer. I’d had a poor sleep the night before — tormented by the engine noise of a single mosquito that would not sputter into silence. Eventually, I was forced to turn on the reading lamp and smack him dead with the bottom of a Kleenex box.

  Now it was nap time, time for my heart to slow to a drip. I thought of golf: a green expanse of lawn, the chubby players strolling toward a bunker. I thought of an inner tube, tractor-size, and the river on which it floated languidly downstream. Then I remembered front-yard football with my younger brothers, how in autumn we tackled each other and got up each time, with only slight lumps at the end of the day. Then my trip to England came into view: Sussex County and a place called Dedham. I was strolling through a leaf-strewn cemetery. The ancient headstones were unreadable from centuries of rain. Birds made their noises. Wind rustled the pant legs where my bony ankles peeked out. I was with Carolyn in this little episode, and then without her. Leaves, lots of leaves, leaves attached to limbs, leaves in raked piles, leaves in sweaters, leaves . . . I was asleep.

  Minutes later I awoke, sensing a voyeur in the room. I opened an eye: my cat, front paws pressed together, was staring at me. Oh, do you have to? I thought. I moaned for the luxury of sleep and rolled onto my other side. I tried my best to return to dreamland. Ponder leaves, I ordered myself: a storm of leaves swinging from a tree; leaves hitching a ride on your pant cuffs; leaves torn in half, one half given to the person you love best; leaves like a multitude of butterflies . . .

  But the cat meowed in his castrato voice. He nudged his head against my arm. My sleep was over.

  I like my cat. During our sixteen years together, he has more than earned his keep by pulling many a rat from our furnace closet. Still, I wasn’t about to break down and pet him. He meowed, then meow-meowed twice, as if preparing to sing.

  “Do I bother you when you nap?” I asked, picturing him in our yard, sunlight on his back. With his short legs shot out from his body, he could look like roadkill.

  The cat blinked. I closed my eyes again. Sleep, I told myself, sleep, sleep . . .

  I was startled by the sound of a doorknob turning — Carolyn? Wasn’t she in Dedham — no, I mean, at church? I sat up, groggily. I didn’t wish to embarrass myself, a former stallion with sparks in each prancing step but now an old mule with his fly-hooded face staring downward. What would she think if she found me napping before noon? Feeling drugged, I stared at the floor, my arms so weak that I had trouble raising them to rub my face into liveliness.

  “Carolyn,” I called brightly, my hooves hitting the carpeted floor. “I thought you said you were going to church?”

  “The meeting was cancelled. Can you help?” She was hauling two bags, her left side drooping slightly. Maybe she hadn’t forgotten my request after all, maybe my six-pack of suds weighed heavily among the groceries. Both cat and I were suddenly awake at the lovely sight of a wife coming through the front door with grub.

  I took both bags and hoisted them onto the kitchen counter. In one bag I viewed a pineapple with its prickly armor.

  “What have you been doing?” she asked, her hands under the faucet. (Another rule in our house: wash your hands after you’ve been in public.)

  “Working on my story,” I answered, the last clouds of sleepiness passing across the surface of my eyes. I began to bring out items from the two bags: the pineapple that was more top than body, celery, onions, bagged carrots, bread, an avocado hard as a baseball, dish soap. The heaviness in one bag had been ten pounds of russet potatoes, and I could see that we were going to have soup. She had forgotten the beer.

  I opted for wine that evening. I stared out the big window at our yard until the shadows took over. Night seeped into all the bushy corners, and I, not having much to do, crawled into bed within the hour. I was alive and in my early sixties. Strangely, a leaf was attached to my red sweater.

  Daytime naps are preparations for the longer sleep.

  * * *

  Last week, my buddy David and I went to reacquaint ourselves with the San Francisco Symphony. For this performance, the symphony would not be under the figure-eight baton waggle of Maestro Michael Tilson Thomas but Kirill Karabits, a young conductor from Ukraine, via Great Britain. For tickets, I turned to Goldstar, the online outlet, snagging seats regularly priced at sixty-five dollars for ten dollars, plus a convenience fee. Not bad, I mused, for a world-class symphony that would present Britten, Sibelius, and Honegger — an unfamiliar name to me. I dressed for the occasion in a wool suit, the silk lining an elegant paisley, the buttons a walnut hue. The cologne on my throat? La Male, of course.

  The first piece was Honegger’s Pacific 231. The score seemed to call for two of everything: two flutes, two piccolos, two oboes, two English horns, two clarinets, two bass clarinets, two
sets of cymbals — a sort of Noah’s Ark of musical sounds. Born in France, Arthur Honegger lived in the early part of the twentieth century, never suspecting that his audience would include an elderly elephant-eared husband and a sumptuously bejeweled wife, both dressed according to their rank in life (very swell), and both nearly asleep when the tempo suddenly increased, by way of a bass drum. Both husband and wife opened their eyes as if the paddles of a defibrillator had sparked them back to life. The conductor called on the violins to get busy, then invoked a glockenspiel to make noise. The husband cried, “This music is too loud — we can’t sleep!”

  That was a Thursday matinee. Perhaps they paid full price, unlike my buddy and I, and were there for a luxurious nap. The next piece was by Britten, composed in his later years. Here, the couple really got their money’s worth: the concerto for two violins was a yawner. Their soft chins settled down on their chests. The woman’s eyelids were periwinkle-colored, nearly matching her bluish hair. The elderly man’s hands, set on his tummy, twitched in dream.

  THE FBI

  One thing you can say for sure about the FBI is that they like paperwork. Also that their typing pool (do they still use that term?) is flawless. I’m thinking of them because I had to do some research on Cesar Chavez and the peregrinación (the pilgrimage, or march) that occurred in spring 1966. Some labor history: the United Farm Workers (originally the National Farm Workers Association, or NFWA) began in Delano, California, in 1962; its first convention was held that same year in Fresno. Its membership at the time consisted of two hundred workers, mostly of Mexican descent. The other union in the Delano area was the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee, or AWOC, representing mostly Filipino Americans. Despite the divide based on race, their concerns were the same: large corporate farms jacking them around.

  In 1965, Filipino workers walked out of the fields run by Schenley Industries, which had cut their hourly wage from $1.40 to $1.25. Larry Itliong of the AWOC asked Chavez if the NFWA would join them in a strike. Chavez was hesitant at first, because of his union’s smallish size — the rank and file had by then increased only to about six hundred, each paying monthly dues of $3.50. Still, Chavez sided with the AWOC and a strike was called in mid-September 1965. In time, the two unions would merge to become the United Farm Workers of America.

  Now about the peregrinación, in which union members and supporters walked from Delano to Sacramento during the spring of 1966. Chavez was determined to bring attention to la causa. For the union to become more visible, he found it necessary that the public, in both the local region and beyond, have a grasp of a farm laborer’s working conditions and meager wages, as well as a sense of the prevailing attitudes on the corporate farms. Schenley Industries was not a mom-and-pop operation; it embraced four thousand acres in the San Joaquin Valley. Moreover, there was the serf-like destiny of the families that worked these fields. (College? What’s college?) Chavez needed the public’s support and imagined that a march would do the trick. The peregrinación took a circuitous route, meandering through the valley for nearly three hundred miles.

  The reason for my research: Quad Knopf, a company that does civil and traffic engineering, surveying and construction management, labor and environmental compliance, land-use planning and landscape architecture, among other like services — and with offices in Visalia, Bakersfield, Fresno, and Roseville — was heading something called the Golden State Corridor Planning Improvement Project. They were planning street improvements in Fowler, Selma, and Kingsburg, all agricultural-based communities. During these upgrades, “cultural and historic preservation goals” would be considered. To me, this meant preserving the history of the UFW.

  The peregrinación passed through Fowler on March 25, 1966, or so I read in an announcement to union members that had been circulated to the press. I made a telephone call to Lydia Zabrychki, director of business partnering for Quad Knopf. Ms. Zabrychki asked if I could confirm that the march had passed through Fowler (her interest was piqued); I told her I would do some research. I went to a Freedom of Information Act site on the Internet, searched Cesar Chavez, and found hundreds of pages on the labor leader and his union activities. There were plenty of blacked-out names, obscured to protect an FBI employee or informant. But, in all of those hundreds of pages, there was not a single typo. How did they do that back then, before the advent of word processing? Even before Wite-Out, the correction fluid?

  I could not confirm that the march had passed through Fowler because I could not identify the dates when the marchers entered and exited Fowler. The site had records for March 17 to March 22, then a gap — what happened to March 23 through March 25? Had the FBI left the route to answer another call, perhaps a political spat on the other side of the country? This was 1966 after all, and the Vietnam War — so wrong, so immoral — was at the forefront of our country’s consciousness. But the FBI, which had infiltrated the union, had been present on day one. As an informant wrote:

  On March 17 [blackened name(s)] advised as follows: The National Farm Workers Association (NFWA) sponsored march group gathered at NFWA Headquarters 102 Albany, Delano during the early morning of March 17, 1966. At approximately 9:00AM, March 17, 1966 the group proceeded to the corner of Garces and Albany, Delano, where they conferred with officials of the Delano Police Department concerning a sudden change in the route of the march. NFWA spokesmen had originally notified police officials at Delano that they would be taking a route north of the downtown section of Delano while enroute to the Tulare-Kern County line; however, just before the march was to begin, they put the police on notice to the effect that they would be marching directly through Main Street, Delano . . . There were approximately 100 persons involved at the beginning of the march, including men, women and small children. About seventy-five percent of the marchers were Mexican-Americans or Filipinos and the remainder Anglo-Caucasians, with two or three Negros.

  My intentions when contacting Quad Knopf? Because they were hired to do road improvements in the Fowler area, along or near Highway 99, I intended to ask if a tree could be planted in honor of the union’s progress through the valley. The public should know that an important event occurred in Fowler, an otherwise sleepy town. Our memory of social causes is not deep. Things happen, things go away. In my mind, I saw a young tree — elm or sycamore — hurtling skyward. I saw the citizens of Fowler visiting this tree, maybe even peeling off a bit of bark, bearing it home like a totem or charm, recalling the calloused hands of farm workers.

  If you planted a tree in California for every person affected by Cesar Chavez, the state would be one large, dense forest.

  * * *

  In August 2011, I drove to Galt, California, where the UFW was conducting another march to Sacramento. Then as now, this is what happens when conditions for farm workers become intolerable. The marchers were headed to the state capitol to confront Governor Jerry Brown, once a compatriot of the union.

  I hustled to catch up to the tail of marchers — forty, I tallied, not many. They were on their way to Walnut Grove, sixteen miles away. The march had begun in Madera, three counties south. This was day five. In all, the march would take ten days, meandering through the back roads of Central California, and eventually accumulating 125 marchers.

  Arturo Rodriquez, the president of the union, was glad to see me. He smiled, squeezed my shoulder, and said, “Hey, Gary.” But I didn’t pester him. He was on his cell phone, doing his best to get media coverage. His wife, Sonia, was also glad for my skinny presence. Sonia is a former educator; we talked about what children need: money to go school, either college or trade. And she asked if I could come up with a novelty idea — she knows I can be funny — in celebration of the union’s fiftieth year in 2012. (Later, I wrote to suggest that I could dress up as a Chicano hippie, drive a VW up and down California, and bring back the good old days of clench-fisted radicals. It was an idea, even if no one else liked it.)

  Outside Walnut Grove, we stopped near a trailer park. We rested in the
shade, each one of us crowing about some aspect of our lives — family recipes, sports, trees, work, non-work, art, food banks, cell phones, husbands, wives, children, Mexico at the border, Mexico in the interior, education. Among the marchers were two young people, boyfriend and girlfriend, from Birmingham, England. They were presently living in Berkeley and maintaining an urban garden plot in Oakland. They also had regular part-time jobs, but wanted to know some farm workers. Just who were they?

  While we mingled in the shade of a large mulberry, a man and a woman came out of the trailer park. The man, I remember, was wearing Bermuda shorts, with white socks up to his knees, and a plaid buttoned-up shirt. The woman (his wife, we learned later) walked a step behind him. At first, I feared he was going to scold us, ask us to move on, tell us that we were a bunch of commies. Instead, he asked if we could form a circle, which we did without question, all of us moving slowly together so that our shoulders were touching or almost touching. He said a prayer that didn’t really inspire much feeling, and when he finished he took the three umbrellas his wife was holding.

  “I know it’s hot,” the man remarked. “Could you use these?” He scanned our meager gathering for takers.

  This gesture made me turn away, the tears leaping like seeds from some unknown reservoir in my face. Umbrellas, I thought later, why would umbrellas make me cry?

  On the last stretch of the march for that day, the unfurled umbrellas went from hand to hand — by then we were used to the sun and heat. One was finally given to me. I broke it open — so ridiculous, so camp — and walked into Walnut Grove under a portable shade.

  PARAPHRASE

  For centuries the Chinese were ruled by wisdom not force, but this changed during the 1800s, when the merchant-minded English pointed their guns at them. Metaphorically, the Chinese raised their hands. In actuality, they raised their hands and were led away in thin lines longer than belief. Britain looted the country for several generations and would have continued looting the country except that the Chinese came up with their own firepower. The British sailed away, perhaps singing “Rule Britannia,” under their breath. Back home they sat bewildered around long, polished tables, asking themselves, “What went wrong?” They feigned innocence and stared disappointedly into their cups of Earl Grey.