Jean Craighead George wrote a book that was a staple of my childhood: Julie Of The Wolves.

It’s a book about a very young (like thirteen years old) native Alaskan girl who was an orphan and made to marry an abusive guy that doesn’t even want to be her husband. And that’s just the beginning of the book.

She decides to run away from that crappy situation (an attempted rape that was the last straw for her) to try to reach a friend who lives far away, but gets hopelessly lost on the Alaskan tundra.

Her only hope for survival is to draw on the traditional ways of her people and possibly befriend a wolf pack she comes across.

Apparently Jean Craighead George came up with the idea to write Julie Of The Wolves while on a trip to Barrow, Alaska to do research for an magazine article on wolves.

She had brought her son along for the trip and while in a plane he spotted an Eskimo girl by herself on the tundra. Her son commented that the girl “looked awfully little to be out there by herself.”

While in Barrow she saw many people communicating with wolves and met a woman called Julia Sebevan who taught her about “the old ways of the Eskimos.”

After having so much inspiration in Alaska Jean Craighead George went back home and decided to write a story about an Eskimo girl trying to survive alone on the tundra, basing the main character on Julia Sebevan.

Julie Of The Wolves went on to win many awards, including the Newbery Medal. And despite being a book that was one of the most frequently challenged by parents during that decade (due to the rape scene) it actually made it on to the shelves of my school library.

I drank up all stories about Alaska when I was a kid so when I saw the cool looking cover of Julie Of The Wolves and that the book was about Alaska it was a sure thing that I was going to take it off the shelf and finish it by the next day. I ended up liking the book so much that I bought my own copy and ended up reading it many times over.

So yeah what a loss to have Jean Craighead George pass away, she was such an amazing storyteller. I’m glad she had ninety-three years of life and that she decided to write Julie Of The Wolves, RIP.

This was Southern California in the late 1970s. I was 13, and I’d persuaded my parents to let me ride to school. This was done purely in the interest of survival.

The older kids on my bus were a bullying, drug-addled lot who tormented the weak. By which I mean me. One day a ninth-grader wearing a Black Sabbath T-shirt—Jessie, pronounced “Jess-eye,” as in Jess I do have discrete quantities of marijuana available for purchase—ripped my sneaker off and chucked it out the window.

They next day it was my hat. Eventually, I figured, he’d toss me out whole.

That’s part of a cool little story that I randomly came across today and liked quote a bit.

I liked the story because not only was the writing done well imo but the story itself made a good point… well I don’t want to ruin it, you can read the whole thing over at Bicycling Magazine:

http://www.bicycling.com/news/featured-stories/freedom

What did you think of the story, did you like it Y/N? The last half kind of made me nostalgic for all the adventures I used to get into as a kid roaming around on my bike.

Maurice Sendak died this morning from complications from a stroke he suffered a few days ago.

He wrote and illustrated Where The Wild Things Are, one of the most beloved children’s books of all time …er, or maybe I’m just biased because it was one of my favorite stories as a child.

I take a bit of solace in the fact that he got 83 years of life, but still what a loss to the world :(.

I gotta admit I’ve cried over the death of fictional characters quite a few times :P. My earliest memory of doing this was when I was a kid and I got to the end of Charlotte’s Web… I cried so hard and was wrecked for weeks!

I don’t know how it is now but they seemed to be everywhere when I was a kid, a ubiquitous part of any setting where children would be sitting for more than ten minutes.

And apparently they were cheap too because even the poorest of kids had quite a few of them laying around or mixed in with random toys.

I had some at home but my main memories of Little Golden Books are of reading them at dreary places from a kid’s POV like laundromats and miscellaneous waiting rooms for appointments.

Those places were dull, dull, dull. That is until I’d found a stash of these books, then I could escape into a few stories to pass the time. Thank goodness for Little Golden Books or else I would have died of boredom at a young age LOL.

Now they have Kindle editions of them so I guess there’s no more hunting around for books to read if you’re a kid stuck at the laundromat. Well, if your parents let you use the Kindle that is, and you’re not already playing a video game or something :P.

This is exactly what happened to me when I was a kid and on a trip with some family friends. All of us kids were running around the trails and I ran smack dab into this unsettling scene.

As it turns out I actually knew this woman, well kind of, she was the grandmother of the family we were traveling with. I had seen her on many occasions but had never actually spoken with her because she had only arrived from China a couple months before and didn’t know any English.

We had exchanged smiles and a couple of nods but beyond that she mainly liked to sit in her chair in the dining room and watch tv. But then again I had never seen her around a tree before.

I went over to where the adults were gathered. They were not too far away but still at a respectful distance to keep an eye on the situation. My alarm must have shown (I’m pretty sure my face said ‘Is she crazy?’) because the daughter-in-law started to explain to me what was happening.

So what was the woman at the tree doing exactly? The daughter-in-law explained that she was drawing out energy from the tree and if she sat very still with her arms out she could gather the tree energy. the daughter-in-law was not a believer in this ritual but she said many people from the old country though it worked very well and that they could even feel the energy coming in through their arms.

Apparently this tree energy harvesting ritual had caused quite a stir in the condo the woman had just moved into. The neighbors would see here standing motionless in front of a tree with arms outstretched and were prone to call the cops thinking she was in some kind of distress.

It only made things worse that she couldn’t speak English and explain to them that ‘Actually officer I’m harvesting energy from this tree through my arms’, which might have gotten her arrested anyway now that I think about it lol.

So there we all stood amidst the trees, looking around but really watching a particular tree and the woman next to it. Was the daughter-in-law lying to me about the tree energy harvesting thing? I had never considered that until I remembered this story as an adult. She did seem embarassed and it is possible that she was ashamed of the woman having some sort of mental illness or something like Alzheimer’s.

Or… maybe somewhere in China there’s a group of people right now standing next to trees with arms outstretched and feeling the energy buzzing through their arms and into their bodies.

She sought what lay in the shadow of star stamped concrete.

‘Must be covered in snow’, she said and began punching holes in the ice.

 

Jennifer Hint Memoir Month

What is a hint memoir?

More hint memoirs.

Feel free to post your own hint memoirs in the comments too if you want I’d love to read em :).
 

 

BOOK IT! it said in friendly rounded white letters and was meant to encourage you, the school child, to get into the magical world of reading.

The key to the whole operation though was the little golden stickers, literally the stars of the show.

For each book you read you got a single star, so small that they were hard to place precisely with uncoordinated child hands. With five of these pasted at the top of the button you’d win the tongue-twisting grand prize: a Personal Pan Pizza from Pizza Hut.

I mean free pizza right? How can you not be happy with that, especially as a child? Little did I know at the time that this whole thing was simply a marketing front to get families into Pizza Hut restaurants.

It seems so obvious now that I’m older, with every child going into Pizza Hut to trade stickers for a free Personal Pan Pizza there would usually come a mother, father, and siblings all paying full price for their food and drinks and maybe even trying Pizza Hut dine-in for the first time.

But to me back then it married two things that I love a lot, books and pizza. Hells yea. Or maybe more like, totally radical dude.

I was a big fan of Book It and when I collected the right number of golden stars my grandmother would take my family out for dinner at Pizza Hut and I would feast on my Personal Pan Pizza. Which only had pepperoni and cheese on it, because that’s all Book It allowed you to get for free and if I ordered more toppings that would kind of kill the point of it being free wouldn’t it? Er, anyway…

The pizza was the high point of my Book It career by all means but for every high point there’s also a rock bottom.

In my class if you wanted a star for Book It then you had to read a book from a certain book pile that the teacher had set up in class. No exceptions. Well, maybe there were but she wasn’t the kind of teacher that you asked for exceptions to things know what I mean?

One day I was one of the last kids to get to pick from the pile and the selection of books… left much to be desired. I picked the least boring looking one and hoped for the best.

The best did not come. Each page turn brought another eternity of excruciatingly boring sentences, the only highlight being the possibility that a papercut would come along and wake me up. I tried, I really did, I do love books but there’s a line and this one was way over.

In our class not only did you have to read a book from the pre-approved pile but to actually get the golden star you had to sit with the teacher and tell her a summary of the book.

Well when the time came for me to go over and talk to her I had read (or should I say endured) something like a measly one and a half chapters. Yeah. That wasn’t going to cut it with this teacher, she was strict and not likely to give out those stars to just anyone who wanted it. You had to earn those stars dammit.

And so as I walked up to the empty chair I formulated a plan that is the basis of my confession today lol.

I sat down and the teacher took the hardback book from my hand. ‘So tell me about the book’, she said. Or actually probably not because she was someone that generally used more formal language than that, but you get the idea.

And so I did. Tell her about the book. The part I had read anyway.

Starting from the very first sentence I proceeded to give a very, um, detailed account of what had happened in the book. Even under the best of circumstances it can take a while to read a chapter and a half, but to say it all out loud takes even longer.

I knew this was a mission of attrition but whether it would work in time I had no clue. If she got tired of it and asked me to just skip to the end then I was screwed because I wasn’t up for lying if she outright asked me about it.

Time went on, I wonder if the kids at the desks around me wondered wtf I was doing. I just kept on rolling out dreary sentences describing the details of the book. I gotta say that if I learned anything from that book it was how to draw out time and slow it to a crawl.

The teacher’s face started to change but what did that new expression on her face mean? Was she mad because she’d figured out what I was doing? After a few more uncomfortable moments her formality broke and she finally said…

‘Okay okay you read the book, that’s good thank you!’

Success! I took my tiny star and double timed it back to my desk. As I stuck it on to the purple Book It button I told myself I would never do this again and planned on never ever telling anyone about this ill-gotten golden star…

The pizza was delicious though.

‘You should totally go out like that flight attendant did!’ I said to her, thinking of the beer, intercom expletive, and inflated emergency slide.

 

Jennifer Hint Memoir Month

What is a hint memoir?

More hint memoirs.

Feel free to post your own hint memoirs in the comments too if you want I’d love to read em :).