Happy Birthday, E.B. White

Today is apparently a day of acknowledgement. First Keith M. And I just realized that today is E.B. White’s birthday.

Now – not only are his essays classics of the form (honestly: it’s like he invented the form) – he’s also, of course, one of our most beloved children’s book writers.

Ahem. Really, here is all I need to say:

Wilbur!!! Charlotte!! Now there’s an “s” I can love. Can’t even talk about it. It’s too perfect.

But E.B. White always makes me think of my friend Mitchell, because Stuart Little saved my friend Mitchell’s life.

I think my favorite thing I’ve ever written was about the Stuart Little – Mitchell connection.

And so: in honor of the author whose book saved my friend’s life (already choked up … it’s a killer): I present to you my essay:

An Ode to a Very Special Teacher.

Happy birthday, EB White. Thanks for Stuart Little. Mitchell is my kindred spirit friend, my space-twin, whatever you want to call it … I can’t imagine what it would have been like if I had never met him, and your book made that possible.

An Ode to a Very Special Teacher.

I have a friend who grew up in a nightmare, surrounded by poverty, abandonment, and chaos. He and his siblings clung to one another through it all, and they have emerged intact: healthy beautiful people. But they were brought up in an abusive and reckless nuthouse.

And this post is an ode to a teacher. A teacher who saved my friend’s life. When I say this I am quite serious, although she did not drag him from out of a burning house, or leap in to save him from drowning. No. She recognized the light within him, and she made it her business to protect it, and nurture it, and make sure it survived. If that’s not saving someone’s life, then I don’t know what is.

My friend is extremely intelligent. His parents did not value this in him. On the contrary, it threatened them. To add to all of this, my friend, from a very young age, knew he was “different” from other boys. Somehow. How many other boys would stay home from school and put hot-rollers into their sister’s Cher-doll’s hair? How many other boys could recite Meet Me in St. Louis? How many other boys lip-synched to Barbra Streisand albums? He couldn’t put a name to what was different because he was just a little boy. But he knew it was there.

The teasing he got, from within his family and at school, was brutal. Teasing of this kind has one goal and one goal only: to crush what is different. The difference in him was like a scent and other kids could smell it. So they set out to destroy it. Which is why he would stay home from school, playing with his sister’s Barbies.

The little boy reached the 2nd grade. He had already learned some very hard lessons. He had already experienced cruelty, betrayal, terror. The end of this story could have been a terrible one. All of the cards were stacked against this person.

He might never have gotten out, were it not for his 2nd grade teacher.

I cannot remember her name, but I will hold a place in my heart for her forever. I did not meet this “little boy” until college when we became fast friends, but to my view, this 2nd grade teacher was directly responsible for the fact that this little boy went to college (the first one in his family to do so), that this little boy broke the pattern of abuse in his family, that this little boy got the hell OUT and said NO to what seemed to be his logical fate.

This 2nd grade teacher read E.B. White’s Stuart Little to the class.

And my friend, then 7 years old, had what can only be described as a life-changing experience, listening to that book.

Stuart Little is a mouse, born to human parents. Everyone is confused by him. “Where the heck did HE come from?” My friend, a little boy who was so “different” he might as well have been a mouse born to human parents, a little boy who was, indeed, smaller than everybody else in the class, listened to this book, agog, his soul opened up to it, and it changed his life.

First of all: for the first time, he really got reading. By this I mean the importance, and the excitement, of language. Language can crack open windows in places you thought were just flat brick. Language can create new and better worlds. Language is a way out. To this day, my friend is a voracious reader. I will never forget living with him while he was reading Magic Mountain. We lived in a one-room apartment, and so if I wanted to go to sleep and turn the lights off, my friend would take a pillow into the bathroom, shut the door, curl up on the bathmat, and read Magic Mountain long into the night.

I believe that this voraciousness is a direct result of that 2nd grade teacher reading Stuart Little to the class. If that had not happened, and if it hadn’t been that particular book, my friend might not have become a huge reader, might not have gone to college, might not have gotten OUT. It was that significant.

Stuart Little is “different”. Just like my friend was “different”. In hearing the words of that story, my friend rose above the pain, the loneliness, the torture, the fear, and realized that there were others out there who were “different” too. And that different was GOOD!

And here was the major revelation: Stuart Little’s small-ness ends up being his greatest asset. That which seemed like the biggest strike against him is not at all in the end! My friend, in his 7-year-old epiphany, embraced his size. Small didn’t mean “weak”. Not at all.

Somewhere, in his child-like soul, he knew he was gay although he did not have a word for it. It wasn’t a sexual orientation so much, at that time, but a sensibility. He wasn’t like the other kids. He didn’t know yet what that would mean for him, in his life, but it certainly isolated him in school. And it isolated him at home. And so, hearing about the adventures of Stuart Little, my friend realized that this life that he was living right now , the narrow circle of poverty and pain, did not have to be his life. He suddenly knew, for the first time in his life, that everything was going to be okay.

As the teacher read the story to the class, my friend had the intense sensation that the teacher was reading it directly to him, and only to him. It was such a strong feeling that he was able to describe it to me, vividly, years and years later. The rest of the class fell away, and it was as though she had singled him out, she was trying to give him a message of some sort, through the words of E.B. White. That book was for him.

By the time high school came around, my friend had learned that wit was the best defense against teasing. His humor, his sarcasm became his armor, but it also became the way he made friends. In a very short time, he acquired what can be only referred to as bodyguards, high school football players, who thought he was hilarious, and who protected him in the locker room, pushing anyone off who tried to mess with him.

My friend had a close circle of friends, all witty, artistic, interesting people, and these friends pushed him to apply to college, because they all were applying to college. And so he applied to college. He got in. He went to college. He graduated.

Years later, many years after college, he ran into that 2nd grade teacher in a breakfast restaurant in Rhode Island.

She (a teacher to the core) recognized him immediately, even in his adult-ness. She said, “My goodness – it is so wonderful to see you! I have heard so many wonderful things about what you are up to – how are you??”

They talked for a while. He caught her up on his life, she listened and supported him. She still was invested in what had happened to that small special boy she had taught many many years before.

And then, in a burst of open-ness, my friend said to her, kind of blowing it off, laughing at himself, “You know … this is kind of silly … but I want to tell you that … I remember so vividly you reading Stuart Little to the class. It had a huge impact on my life … and … I know it’s crazy and everything, but at the time, I truly had the feeling that you were reading it just to me.”

She looked at him then, smiled, and said, “I was.”