Stepping Out & Stepping In

I want my children to turn into the type of people who are generally up for skydiving, swimming with hammerheads, and leading small revolutions in faraway banana republics, but I don’t actually want them doing those things. Call this a matter of virtual ambition then; maybe someone will get around to inventing a Wii application for toppling foreign dictators by the time my children are old enough to live up to my fantasies.

Still, a pretty considerable percentage of children’s literature is thematically dedicated to the proposition that getting out in the world and challenging yourself with unusual circumstances is typically a better, more exhilarating, even nobler alternative than sitting at home watching nature shows or reading the paper.

Complacence begets sloth - physically, socially, spiritually, or so goes the argument. I am personally challenged to even wipe the powdered donut off my face after getting through with sports page, yet the titular newspaper-reading hero of Somebody Loves You, Mr. Hatch somehow manages to rouse himself every morning at 6:30 for his job at the shoelace factory. He eats the same cheese-and-mustard sandwich for lunch alone in the corner, he orders a turkey wing for his supper, and so on, until his comfortable rut is fatefully interrupted when Mr. Hatch receives an anonymous heart-shaped box of chocolates in the mail, starts wearing aftershave and polka dot ties, and more cheerfully acknowledges the potential variations of his daily existence.

Mr. Hatch is always the first character to jump into my mind when I consider the merits of adventuring, but there are so many others that to compose a denomination for their kind – Stepping Out and Coming Home? – is really an exercise in parsing. Half the children’s books I like are, in one way or another, related to the benefits of taking risks – whether it is stepping out or stepping in that seems immediately riskier.

In Kevin Henkes’ Jessica, a girl takes some first tentative steps toward trading in her imaginary friend for the realer, more challenging variety.  In Courage, by Bernard Waber, the new kid on the block introduces himself to a group of baseball-playing flabbergasted-looking boys: “Hi, my name is Wayne. What’s yours?”

Then courage can simply derive from looking at the world in higher definition, like the chipmunkey Boris in Peter Cohen’s Boris’s Glasses, who acts on a prescription to remedy his astigmatism by summoning the nerve to approach the cute girl at the bakery, then briefly takes a job at the radio factory, supervising the plug department - “because if you can’t plug the radio in, no music will come out.”

Like Dodsworth, in Tim Egan’s The Pink Refrigerator, who receives his original inspiration from anonymous messages left at the junkyard – “paint pictures,” reads one - which finally amount to more than a sum of instructions. Dodsworth ends up scenically peddling a wagonload of essentials into the sunset.

Like the crab in Eric Carle’s A House For Hermit Crab, initially tentative, who ends up marshalling an entire underwater community to build, then share, his home.

Like, well, too many characters to merit their own category. Audacity is not a special interest. I guard this hope for my children that their ambitions should remain varied and renewable, and I guard this hope for myself that I will not forget what that feels like. We get trapped in routines – all of us – and take, I think, excessive pride in all of the things we can’t be bothered with now we’re so serious.

For parents of small children there is potentially some stirring, even joyful reminder to be gained from Boris, from Hermit Crab, from Mr. Hatch; it’s not just the sports page that reduces us to sugar-powdered slobs. Remember what it was like to perform in front of a room full of adults? How many among us have not occasionally felt dim, clumsy, out of practice with words and social graces? Felt like we were only just returning from some savage little country where no one spoke English and the best you could do was wave your arms and make loud monosyllabic pronouncements. We are, of course. We are returning from that place.

Hi, my name is Jay. What’s yours?