The People You Meet

Call Me Marianne by Jen Bryant, pictures by David A. Johnson, Eerdmans Books for Young Readers, 2006

There’s a little story I get to hear from time to time—part of my family lore—which my father and uncle like to tell as a way of describing the matter-of-fact way in which they rubbed shoulders with some pretty extraordinary people as children. To them, these people were friends of their father’s, house guests, dinner guests, visitors. Ordinary, albeit interesting, people, who, it turned out, just happened to be pioneers and experts in their professions. My uncle, who was 7 or 8 years old at the time of this particular story, was out in the back yard playing in a pile of dirt. He was trying to make a tunnel, and I imagine it was going about as well as when I tried to make tunnels as a kid. After some time he was joined by his father’s current houseguest. The man saw what he was doing and offered his help. They worked together, the man offering all sorts of good advice and practical explanations, and pretty soon they had a very satisfactory tunnel. Apparently it was many years before my uncle found out exactly why he ended up with such a good final product: the houseguest was Ole Singstad, civil engineer—the third and final chief engineer overseeing construction of the Holland Tunnel, as well as designer of the Lincoln Tunnel, Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel, and the Queens-Midtown Tunnel.

This book, Call Me Marianne, quietly, beautifully, tells the fictional story of a boy who goes to the zoo to see a new lizard exhibit. He meets a kindred spirit of sorts, a woman he notices on the bus on the way to the zoo because of her odd, tri-cornered black hat and the fact that she is holding the same newspaper clipping about the exhibit as he is. He later finds the hat at the zoo, remembers the woman, and returns it to her. They visit the lizard exhibit together, and as they are watching and talking, he discovers that she is a poet, and asks her what poets do. She explains to him, shows him her notebook, and towards the end of their visit together gives him a gift as a thank you for returning her hat. “’You could write poetry,’ Marianne whispers.” What powerful words.

The story is fictional, but the poet was a real person. Marianne Moore studied biology in college, and spent a lot of time at the zoo, studying animals and using them in her poetry. She could often be seen around Brooklyn, dressed all in black with a black tri-cornered hat on her head. I love the quiet power of the way the boy and the famous poet interact in this story—how their encounter is both ordinary and extraordinary at the same time.

Here’s the wondrous thing: my own children have never been to Brooklyn, never met a famous poet, never built a tunnel with an important engineer. But they have nevertheless met some pretty amazing people, themselves. For one thing, ordinary people aren’t really ordinary, at all, once you get to know them. But beyond that? They read. It’s no empty cliché to say that you meet people and go places in books. I think about the books I read, the music I listened to, and the concerts and operas and ballets I attended as a child, and those things are as much a part of me as the people I knew “in real life.” Every personality my kids meet in a book, every story they hear, every experience they vicariously have, weaves itself into the fabric of their being along with the flesh-and-blood people they know. And all of it works together on a life. Just last night, Middle (who was reading about a girl who chooses to make her own doll because her mom refuses to buy her a Connie doll) said to me, “Mom, Fanny is a very creative girl…I think I should make a doll, too." What powerful words.