One Evening in Maine

Image from McCloskey’s ONE MORNING IN MAINE

We were all wide-eyed readers once–even the picture book creators that are making eyes widen today.

It was grand to watch picture book creators Cathryn Falwell, Melissa Sweet, Charlotte Agell, Lisa Jahn-Clough, and Chris Van Dusen smile sheepishly and gleefully when meeting Jane McCloskey at the Maine Humanities Council‘s celebration of the 60th Anniversary of the picture book,  One Morning in Maine.

As the celebration was called One Evening in Maine, Jane McCloskey, read a selection from her book Robert McCloskey: A Private Life in Words and Pictures about an evening with her parents complete with Dan Rather on the television, a disagreement over potatoes, and the past planting of a maple tree  on the island.  I closed my eyes and could see it all play out in the kitchen from One Morning in Maine —even imagining adult Jane standing at this sink doing the dishes after dinner.

To be an adult with my eyes closed imagining the interior pages of a book I loved as the girl from that book read before me, was an indescribable tide of  gratitude for a career (of sorts) that brought me here.

When a Maine Humanities Council staff member rose to talk about their programs and talked about using One Morning in Maine in prison reading groups, the gratitude deepened.  Somewhere in Maine there is an incarcerated woman who was severely abused as a girl and who was only kept slightly whole by the three McCloskey books that her great grandmother gave to her and read to her again and again.  Gratitude for great grandmothers.

I only had time for a few words with Jane McCloskey and decided not to tell her how I wished to be her as a girl (for how often does she hear it and how uncomfortable it must be for her to).  I told her how the Maine’s Raising Readers program (where I am the Book Consultant) included Blueberries for Sal in an anthology of Maine authors and illustrators and One Morning in Maine in another anthology.  Between the two anthologies, I told her, Raising Readers brought her father into 20,000 Maine homes.  Jane expressed wonder and gratitude and then shyly moved on through the crowd.

What picture books do for all of us is elusive and wonderful and the gratitude for those that create them is so hard to express.  Thank you to the Maine Humanities Council for offering an evening that leaves me tongue-tied once again about the power of word and pictures on a page.  And thank you to all the Creators that allow me to help express the power of their own books.