Deer Valley Girl

Any kid who grew up with The Bixby will remember the white marble boy with the horn, and wondering why he was sitting naked in the middle of the room like that. They would remember the way the heat sang from the metal radiators, overly hot, while the rest of the room stayed cold, and how the pale men and women in the paintings on the wall seemed so serious.

I thought the Bixby would be the perfect place to write on a July afternoon, to catch up on this blog that is so hard to catch up on. I couldn't have known it would be Children's Hour, that it would be loud and hot and miserable.

I sat, forcing myself to write from the grip of my Yankee work ethic for as long as I could, until I suddenly stormed out. Fuming and frustrated, I stormed past the white marble boy, the stained glass ceiling, down the stairs with the green-brown rail. Where, in the middle of the sidewalk, just as suddenly, I stopped.

"Go back," I heard a voice say, quietly from inside.

Loosening the grasp of the need to get things done, I turned around, in order to let things happen.

I followed myself back up the stairs, past the singing, clapping Children's Hour, around the corner, and down on my knees. An unwinding of muscle memory brought me back to my favorite spot, a place I hadn't been for thirty-five years. My arm remembered the Lois Lenski books I had loved there and, reaching up, found there was only one left, Deer Valley Girl. I opened up to the back of the book and found my old number, hand written in pencil by the librarian, with the due date stamped, 1978.

It was Lois Lenski that first showed me there was a world outside the world I knew. Then came Tintin, with National Geographic, wrapped in brown paper, sprinkled throughout.