The Enduring Endurance of Charlotte and Her Pig
In November, I shall have been a mother for fifty years. I never envisioned the possibility that one day my children would be older than I was when both my parents were dead, that I would outlive my younger brother, and that I would be a grandmother older than my own was when this fifty-year-old, her fourth great-grandchild, was born. . . . The breadth of it all amazes me.
That my children survived my parenting is another source of amazement. Having grown up the too-often surrogate parent for my many siblings, I thought I would naturally take to it. I’d have perfect children because I’d be a perfect mom. Of course, I was wrong. Dead wrong. In so many ways. I was subject to so many ineptitudes.
But one thing I got right was entertainment.
We did not have a color television until the firstborn reached the age of 11. It just didn’t seem necessary. As a result, Saturday morning cartoons were easily abandoned in favor of playing outdoors. At night, no one ever begged to stay up for just one more show or sneaked back into the living room to steal a look at what mommy and daddy were watching. From the time they were tiniest tots, they wanted stories.
Stories were commonplace in our house even before the first of our blessed events. Stories were a tradition begun during their father‘s and my courtship. In our first conversation, we discussed Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder, based on Friedrich Rückert’s stories of dying and dead children. We often camped, and we read to one another under the stars . . . works as innocent as Alice in Wonderland as self-conscious as I’m OK You’re OK. One of my motivations to have children was the impetus to continue reading stories aloud, to sharing adventures vicarious and fabulous.
At first I sang the stories. I’d warble convoluted folksongs with sad or inspirational themes or I’d set the story of our day to some monotonal melody or stitch it into a familiar tune and add the story of a journey we had made. Then came the infinite rides we took with books.
We traveled with a bear of little brain on honey-seeking safaris, with elephants from the African savannah to Paris, in a car to the Eifel Tower, to a balloon over the ocean, the big, blue ocean, then on to a tropical island and back to Africa. We laughed at the silliness of an urban monkey whose curiosity continually got him into and out of trouble. We marveled at the D’Aulaire’s version of Greek mythology, tzikached at Aesop. The child who is now turning 50 had a penchant for maps and atlases so we read about faraway places and charted journeys they would take as adults. We soared through those books.
Even after all were more than competent readers on their own and were devouring books by themselves, we read as a family. Especially when we traveled.
Road trips were our vacations of choice, and we drove across the country listening to story cassettes, precursors of Audible recordings. Heroes travled with us. Robin Hood and Little John. A young Fox and a basset hound. Bambi. Under the stars in our campsites or as we wound down in a small motel room, we read aloud until the reader fell asleep.
A favorite author in the post-picture-book days was E.B. White. Charlotte’s Web came first, and we read it more than once. It became our favorite. When the first film version emerged, we saw it together and critiqued it harshly. We reread the book and saw the newer version, which we judged with the same rigor. We loved that book.
The other White books and the essays were lovely. But none ever had the pure cachet we afforded Charlotte’s Web. I hadn’t thought about that in a very long time. After all, a 50-year-old child has been a grown up far longer than they were a child. Reading to my babies resides among the cherished memories of a time long gone.
But time has been kind, and new book memories have settled in, thanks to grandchildren who have loved stories as much as their predecessors did. Two have already passed through our read-aloud nights and are firmly ensconced in teen sensibilities. But I still have one little person left with whom to share the stories.
He lives far away, but we Zoom almost every night. After a little talking, sometimes a game or two, I read him to sleep. In past months, we’ve coursed through 26 Junie B. Jones books, and twelve books about dogs and pirates and wizards. Most recently, I have wandered back with him to the pleasant joy of Charlotte’s Web.
The sheer beauty of the book moves me to tears every single night.
The narrative voice is soothing, even as White describes the prospect of his hero being reduced to bacon and lard, even as he takes us through a mountain of manure into a rat’s nest. Somehow, no matter how ugly the world is, this author finds the words to reassure us that there is reason to be calm, reason to hope that on the next page there will be something fun and joyful.
When the human child Fern’s mother asks her pediatrician if he understands the writing in Charlotte, the Spider’s, web, the doctor admits that he doesn’t. But, he continues, he doesn’t understand how a spider spins a web in the first place. “When the words appeared, everyone said it was a miracle. But nobody pointed out that the web itself is a miracle.”
The humblest of realities, a spider’s web. A miracle. What a lesson for children. And expressed in a prose that is smoothly American English at its best.
“Well, who taught a spider? A young spider knows how to spin a web without any instructions from anybody. Don’t you regard that as a miracle?” The doctor asks. The real miracle is the writing.
My children were young in the Arizona desert, and my grandson lives in a country with a Mediterranean climate. Yet all learned what to expect from a New England winter, what makes fall a season of amazement, why spring springs exuberantly from E.B. White.
“The autumn days grew shorter. . . . The maples and birches turned bright colors and the wind shook them so they dropped their leaves on the ground. Under the wild apple trees in the pasture, red little apples lay thick on the ground.”
No Netflix series, no Nickelodeon animals can bring the world to more vibrant life. Nothing on Youtube compares with the deep satisfaction even an 8-year-old derives from hearing about Charlotte’s affectionate, abiding friendship for a spring pig. And nothing — not even the most sensitive Disney films like Bambi or Soul will ever demonstrate more positively to a child that life includes death, that happiness includes grief, that joy bursts forth from the meanest of realities.
Prodigious marvels are all around us. Even in in a “warm delicious cellar, with garrulous geese, the changing of seasons, the heat of the sun, the passage of swallows, the nearness of rats, the sameness of sheep, the love of spiders, the smell of manure, the glory of everything.”
When I celebrate this fiftieth anniversary of parenting, I shall light a candle of gratitude to E.B. White and his Charlotte for teaching my progeny I’ll always be with them, and they never need to look far for the joys I’ll have left behind.