Against futility
On the painful optimism of children's books
In the little free library down the street from us several weeks ago, I found a book by Tomie dePaola that I’d never seen before: Michael Bird-Boy, the story of a boy named Michael who lives in the country and for some unspoken reason starts each day by putting on a bird suit. It captured Aya’s imagination enough that she seemed to learn the title just by hearing me mention it in passing and one day surprised me by pulling it off the shelf and asking me to read it to her. “Michael Bird-Boy?”
Michael Bird-Boy lives a peaceful life on a farm. dePaola’s illustrations show him tending a garden, collecting eggs, feeding sheep, and at the end of the day, trading his sun hat for the head of his bird suit to sit and gaze at the stars. One day, a black cloud fills the sky, blocking the starlight and making the farm animals sick. When Michael traces the cloud to its origin, he finds a factory that makes artificial honey syrup (the smoke cloud is created by burning sugar). Through the power of friendship and bees, he convinces the owner, Boss-Lady, to turn the factory into a giant beehive instead. The black cloud disappears, Michael bakes a honey cake to share with Boss-Lady, and the stars shine unobstructed again.
The book is pretty corny, the moral clear and the solution quick, but it still moves me, partly thanks to dePaola’s illustrations, which I remember from childhood. I loved the colorful Bill and Pete series about the crocodile, Bill, and the bird, Pete, who is both Bill’s best friend and his toothbrush. What Michael Bird-Boy evokes for me, though, with its human characters and muted palette, is The Clown of God, a book I only vaguely remember as unsettling, our family’s copy coming apart with wear.
Both these books, Michael Bird-Boy and The Clown of God, remind me of the Unitarian Universalist churches I grew up in — churches, plural, because every time we moved, my parents found us a new one, so they became one of the through lines of my childhood; the people changed, but the atmosphere stayed more or less the same, from Peoria to Dallas to Palos Verdes, California — composed generally of older, white, upper-middle-class, college-educated liberals, who accessorized like they shopped at museum gift stores.
Growing up in Unitarian Universalism, I could roll my eyes at it. It was corny in a similar way to Michael Bird-Boy. UUs preached positive change and pushed towards it earnestly, in a generally white liberal way, involving, as far as I could tell at the time, fair-trade coffee, pride flags, and walkathon fundraisers. Internal disagreements were petty and frequent. A feature of the weekly services called Joys and Concerns often turned into a venue for people to come to the mic to cause secondhand embarrassment. Our sex-positive sex-ed classes included flavored-lube-tasting and printed handouts of ways to show love beyond penetrative sex that listed “holding hands” and “mutual masturbation.”
What I realized, years after I stopped going to church with my family, after my brothers and I all left home, was that Unitarian Universalism was part of my foundation. I made some of my first friends in the playgroup my mom took me to at the Peoria church, where we learned about social justice-oriented books in the style of Michael Bird-Boy. I had my first kiss on a church trip to Boston, at the Eliot and Pickett guesthouse, while the boy’s roommates were out at a screening of Rocky Horror. I played flute at church events and sang in the choir. Adults besides my parents cared about me, even though I’d only lived among them for a short time. I thought the Seven Principles — the beliefs that held us together in the absence of commandments or a shared belief in God, and which included “the inherent worth and dignity of every person” and “respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part” — were so basic as to be barely worth mentioning, no matter that they moved my mom to tears with what seemed like every mention. The church gave me that privilege, of taking progressive beliefs for granted, even when we lived in Texas.
When I read Michael Bird-Boy to Aya, I thought, how depressing that this book was written in 1975 and we’re still destroying the planet in the name of capitalism, even though the emergency of it is clear in heat waves and fires and floods? The earnestness of Michael Bird-Boy with his short, child limbs, his fluffy bird suit and pink boots, following the black cloud by foot, wagon, and boat, hurts. And feeling that poignance, I wondered, is this effort — Michael’s, Tomie dePaola’s, ours — beautiful because it’s futile?
In interviews, dePaola seems unsentimental about his work. In 2018, two years before he died, he told the National Endowment for the Arts, “I’m a positive person and my audience is primarily very young children. I have so much hope for the future. We live in a pendulum that swings back and forth… I have faith in these little kids. I really do.”
Because I don’t have my family’s old copy of The Clown of God, I find a video of someone reading it on YouTube. The book is a retelling of a French legend, according to the publisher, about a poor boy named Giovanni who earns his meals by juggling. Over time, he becomes famous, juggling for royalty in beautiful costumes, until he begins to age and people grow tired of his act.
I remember what I found spooky as a child: his painted clown face, the way it wrinkles in his old age, the image of him washing it off in a river, and the overt markers of religion — the baby Jesus, the monks who tell Giovanni that by giving happiness to people, his juggling gives glory to God. These were foreign to me. I went to church, but not a religious one, though as a self-described liberal Catholic who left the church in the 1960s, dePaola would probably have fit in with the UUs I grew up among.
No longer adored by an audience, Giovanni gives up juggling, until one day he seeks shelter in a church and finds people offering gifts to a statue of Mary and Jesus. Empty-handed, he paints on his clown face once more and works his way through his old juggling routine, only to drop to the floor, dead before the final act. No wonder I felt vaguely haunted by this book decades later. In this moment, though, I understand. We try until the end, which is both futile and the very opposite.
Journaling prompt:
Is there a book from childhood that vaguely haunts you? Read it again. How does it feel now?
One thing I loved this week:
Browsing the small-press books at North Figueroa Bookshop. I love tiny books that also feel like art objects, so I was happy to find Cracked Shells by Dimitra Charamandas, an illustrated prose poem that made me slow down to consider it. An excerpt:
“How does the singular body behave in relation to the collective? How does it balance openness toward others against the risk of violation? […] A holistic understanding of these pervasive interactions forms the basis for a much-needed change; for establishing a novel yet ancient relationship between the human and the ‘other,’ the more-than-human, and what we call nature. Whether humans experience themselves as part of or separate from nature is foundational.”