Cody loved all animals, big and small. But she had a special, tender place in her heart for ants. They were so serious! They worked so hard!
from Cody and the Fountain of Happiness
                                                  by Tricia Springstubb
                                            illustrated by Eliza Wheeler
                                                Candlewick Press, 2015

    One day, several years ago, I went to the small park near my house and sat at the base of a favorite tree to think and wonder. My thoughts must have wandered into existential territory as I watched an ant crawl onto a fallen leaf. What universal plan would I upset if I moved the leaf with the ant on it? Would it survive in a new environment? Would it know where it was? How to get food? Would my ant recognize anyone in its new environment?
    I decided it was time to go home.
    But I continued thinking about how much influence any of us has over our surroundings. Well, we can keep our footprints small by avoiding plastic and understanding that when we throw something away, it just gets put somewhere else. We can consume less and re-use more. We can be informed voters. 
    How all beings are connected and how everything in our complicated world is necessary, to a greater or lesser extent, gnaws at my imagination and taps for my attention.
    I know about worms and how they aerate soil and how their droppings are excellent natural fertilizer. But what about those ants? Like worms, lots of them live under the ground. Are they also useful, like worms are?
    The study of ants is called myrmecology. It is well known that ants, like bees live in intricate social systems. A colony can have several fertile females (queens), but it behooves their social order to have fewer rather than more. Worker ants, like worker bees, are all female. They tend the young, forage for food, and defend the colony. Male ants mate with the queen, then, their usefulness complete, they die. The queens continue to lay eggs.
    Ants have lived on earth for over 80 million years. They escaped the great extinction that killed the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. A new study reported by CNN  last week, estimates about 20 quadrillion individual ants are living on our earth at any moment in time. I can’t imagine a number that large, but it must be around a gajillion. Maybe 20,000 trillion is easier to understand, but for me, that’s still about a gajillion. Even entomologists were surprised at the huge number of ants. Etymologists may have been surprised, too, but for very different reasons.
    Scientists examined 489 studies that spanned every continent on earth and discovered that ants are found all over the world, but are more prevalent in the tropics than in colder regions.             
    Ants are beneficial for all the reasons you already know. They turn and aerate the soil as efficiently as earthworms, ensuring plant roots get the air and water they need. Ants often take seeds into their tunnels for food, and some seeds inevitably sprout, encouraging plant dispersion. Ants serve as both predators and prey. Many ants feed on termites. Some like the juicy honeydew aphids produce. And ants are food for other insects, birds, and carnivorous plants like pitcher plants.
    Eating insects, entomophagy, is uncommon here in the US and in most parts of the West, but it is estimated that two billion of the eight billion people on earth are entomophagists, insect eaters. People in Asia, Africa, and Latin America depend on insects for an important protein source. Beetles, caterpillars, bees, wasps, and ants are an important part of their diet. Some of the most popular types of edible ants are leaf-cutting, weaver, honey, and black ants. 
    Larvae and adult ants are prepared by roasting, frying, and boiling. They are common ingredients in recipes and as a condiment. While their nutritional value varies depending on species, metamorphical stage, and preparation methods, ants are high in protein, fiber, vitamins, and minerals. Their low environmental impact combined with their high protein value make ants a viable component to finding a solution for world hunger. 
    More human studies are needed to determine exact nutritional values, but in general, ants, with only a few exceptions, are safe to eat and are environmentally friendly.
    Besides their ecological and nutritional benefits, ants are useful to networking engineers who study their social systems to create their own more efficient and sophisticated networking systems. 
    Then there’s the industriousness of ants. They’ve been a model for good behavior in story and song from Aesop’s “Grasshopper and the Ant” to Frank Sinatra’s “High Hopes.”
    I don’t know what happened to the ant I displaced that day so many years ago. I like to think that it had the symbolic effect of proving resilience, adaptability, and perseverance. 
                                       
                                          -—be curious! (and industrious)    

    “Come along, Paddington. We’ll take you home, and you can have a nice, hot bath. Then you can tell me all about South America. I’m sure you must have had lots of wonderful adventures.”
    “I have,” said Paddington earnestly. “Lots. Things are always happening to me. I’m that sort of bear.”
                                      from A Bear Called Paddington
                                              written by Michael Bond
                                       illustrations by Peggy Fortnum
                                                 Houghton Mifflin, 1958

    We all have our favorite childhood toys. Some feel more real than others. I named my favorite doll Rosebud. Her face was beautiful—-rosy cheeks, a perpetual smile, and blue eyes that closed when she lay down. She wore a filmy pink dress that came down to her pudgy knees. She wore undies, too. I shaped her hair into a handle, perfect for hauling her around.
    Rosebud always agreed or disagreed with me by nodding or shaking her head, and after many years of togetherness, she started showing her age. Her head was getting pretty loose on her neck. The fiber of her body was starting to let go of her plastic head. 
    When it became clear that Rosebud’s life (head) was literally hanging by a thread, my grandmother came to the rescue. She told me she knew someone at a doll hospital who could fix Rosebud up good as new, and I trusted Rosebud to my grandmother’s care. 
    Two weeks went by and Rosebud was still at the hospital. I asked and asked for her. Finally, I think my grandmother gave up hoping I’d forget about her and she returned Rosebud, not good as new, but same as she was. The hospital couldn’t help after all.
    Part of me wanted to keep Rosebud, but I knew deep down that I had outlived her. I found an old shoe box and carefully tucked Rosebud in with tissue paper and covered her up. I got my brother to dig a hole in the backyard where we buried our fish and turtles. We gave Rosebud a few moments of silence and then we moved on.
    Another of our favorites were The Halsam Toy Company’s American Plastic Bricks, the forerunner to LEGO’s. (Here's a fascinating history of the company.) My brother and I had scads and of them stored in empty five-pound Chock-Full-a-Nuts coffee cans. We spent hours and hours building houses, factories, and castles with them.
    Toys are really tools for children. They teach, foster imaginative and creative play, and encourage social interactions with friends, siblings, and grown-ups. The Strong Museum in Rochester, New York, is the location of the National Toy Hall of Fame. It “houses the world’s largest and most comprehensive collection of historical materials related to play.” 
    Margaret Woodbury Strong was born into a wealthy family. She collected all sorts of items in a little bag she carried as her parents showed her the world. She “played with dolls in a Japanese teahouse, rode an elephant in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), and toured the waterfronts of Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Canton.” (from: Museum of Play) 
    By the 1960s, when Margaret was in her late 60s, she had collected over 27,000 items and organized them into over 50 categories. Most were related to children’s play.
    She added two wings to her home to accommodate her staggering (and growing) collection. She thought of this part of her home as a museum and in 1968, she received a provisional charter from New York for the “Margaret Woodbury Strong Museum of Fascination.” She had willed her collections and most of her money to fund and maintain the museum. Thirteen years after her death a year later (1969), the Strong Museum was opened to the public in downtown Rochester, New York.
    The Strong serves a global audience on site, on-line, and through its International Center for the History of Electronic Games, the National Toy Hall of Fame, the World Video Game Hall of Fame, the Brian Sutton-Smith Library and Archives of Play, the Woodbury School, and the American Journal of Play. 
    The National Toy Hall of Fame is gathering experts to evaluate this year’s new inductees. You can join me in voting for this year’s Player’s Choice award. View all the nominees here.  Find the ballot and vote here,  but do it today! Voting closes at midnight tomorrow, September 21. Winners will be revealed Thursday, November 10, 2022.
    If your favorite toy is not part of the collection yet, you can nominate a toy to be considered for the November 2023 induction. Here are the selection criteria and nomination form.
                                              -—be curious! (and play!)

   I was glad to have my own copy, but I couldn’t help thinking about that book that wasn’t on the library shelves anymore, and how I would never have known From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler was my favorite book if I hadn’t found it there in the first place.
                                                  from Ban This Book 
                                                          by Alan Gratz
                          Tom Doherty Associates/Starscape, 2017

    Intellectual Freedom is established in the Bill of Rights. A person’s right to search for and find information on any topic of interest gleaned from a variety of sources and viewpoints is encompassed in the First Amendment’s freedom of expression clause.
    After all, how can we make informed decisions if we can’t learn and discuss all sides of current social issues? How can we decide the fairness of our laws and judicial system if we don’t read widely and listen to different opinions? How can we distinguish facts from opinions?
    One of the main purposes of reading fiction, especially, is to learn about life. What is expected, what is surprising? What “rings true,” what is far-fetched? Isn’t it safer and more practical to expect our kids to be able to reason out a problem when they can vicariously identify with the experiences of sympathetic main characters, well-drawn settings, and conceivable plots? When they can imagine themselves in a difficult situation and see what happens when a character makes a bad decision?
    Remember The Scarlet Letter? Just in case, here it is in a nutshell. Hester Prynn and Reverend Dimmsdale had a child out of wedlock. She paid the extreme cost of public humiliation, emotional distress, and social isolation. He was consumed by guilt. Hester’s husband who everyone thought was lost at sea, returned to hide behind a false identity and was determined to win revenge.  
    When I taught 11th-grade English for a short while, a long time ago, I introduced The Scarlet Letter to my students. While Nathaniel Hawthorne’s own lifetime, pre-Civil War America, was hard for them to imagine, so was his historical setting, 1640s Puritan Massachusetts, two hundred years earlier. But the story was as timely as ever. It still is. 
    The Scarlet Letter was banned shortly after it was published then enjoyed a pretty quiet century or so becoming a classic. In 1961, some parents in Michigan called it “pornographic and obscene.” Their request to have the book removed from the curriculum was denied, but the book continues to be challenged.
    I say this: If you were 16 again, wouldn’t all the public humiliation, emotional distress, social isolation, and guilt make you think twice about consequences? 
    With very few exceptions, material published for an adult audience is mostly left alone.             
    But materials, especially books, fiction and non-fiction, for children is more rigorously considered. Whether it is an author, editor, purchasing agent for a bookstore, or even a librarian who chooses to “self-censor,” a “well-meaning” school-board member, principal, or community activist who wants to “protect” children from the realities of growing up, or a teacher who chooses to stay “non-controversial,” most children’s reading is at least somewhat restricted. 
    In 1939, the American Library Association adopted the Library Bill of Rights. It’s been amended several times. The inclusion of “age” was reaffirmed on January 23, 1996. Most recently, in January, 2019, amendments were added to include programming, meeting spaces, and on-line activities of minors. 
    Article V states: A person’s right to use a library should not be denied or abridged because of origin, age, background, or views. You can access the Library Bill of Rights here,  and the 2019 amendments here. 
    Parents can and do retain the right to oversee their childrens’ activities. This can and does include what children read and have access to. 
    What we as a free and democratic society can NOT allow is for some other adult or group, well-meaning, self-serving, or over-zealously protectionist, to control what is available to all of us, and most meaningful in this current place we find ourselves, our children. No one should be able to override our own right to deem what is appropriate for our own children by saying what is appropriate for all children.
    In other words, like Amy Anne Ollinger, Alan Gratz’s main character in Ban This Book says so clearly, “…I said the same thing to all of them. It was something Mrs. Jones had said the first day Mrs. Spencer came in to challenge Captain Underpants, and I practiced it over and over until I got it right every time:
    ‘Nobody has the right to tell you what books you can and can’t read except your parents.’”
    Let’s protect our kids. But not from the real world. Not from Truth. Let’s protect them from harm by giving them the all the vicarious experiences, all the tools they need for sharp and clear imaginations, and all the courage they need to make good decisions. 
    After all, our kids are our future.
                                   -—be curious! (and read to a child)           

Necessary Gardens
       Libraries
       Are
       Necessary
       Gardens,
       Unsurpassed
       At 
       Growing 
       Excitement
                                           “Necessary Gardens” from
                                      Please Bury Me in the Library
                                          written by J. Patrick Lewis
                                           illustrated by Kyle M. Stone
                                 Harcourt, Inc./Gulliver Books, 2005
   
​    A language’s function is to make communication possible. But that’s only its practical function. We’d all be reduced to automatons if practicality was our sole reason for using language. And while lots of what we communicate is non-verbal, say eye-rolls, applause, all those angsty teenage facial expressions we all (well, mostly all) have outgrown, what we say really does matter. And like my mom always reminded me, how we say what we say is even more important.
    Sarcasm was something she often called to my attention. “Watch your tone, young lady” was usually accompanied with a disapproving non-verbal facial gesture. She meant my tone of voice, the meaning behind my words. Not all of that meaning is poetry, in the strictest sense, but some of it could be. 
    I liked poetry when I was young. I read famous poets. Robert Frost was (still is) one of my favorites. I have a large collection of his work in my own handwriting on lined notebook paper in a time-worn three-ring binder. And while I loved Paul Simon’s lyrics, Art Garfunkel stole my heart. I can still sing most of their hits. Lots of what Paul Simon wrote was poetry. His language holds an electric charge of meaning; it says more, much more than the dictionary definitions of his words.
    Understanding for the first time that written words, like spoken words, could be charged with multiple meaning was what encouraged me to write my own poetry. Most of my attempts were badly executed expressions of how hard it was for me to be a teenager. The pull to maintain the relative safety of my childhood was matched by the need to make my own decisions. I followed rules set for me by others with great resentment. And even less understanding. The bad poetry I wrote was helpful, if only a little.
    Convinced poetry is an art, not really a craft, I didn’t study it. I didn’t know how it worked until an excellent English professor in a poetry-writing class I finally took showed me how poetry makes words more powerful. I learned a lot about the technical aspects of poetry. And then practice and more practice. Metaphor, of course flew to its pinnacle of prominence. Line breaks showed me their ability to emphasize. Cadence and rhythm waltzed and rhumba-ed. And I tried my hand at list-making. 
    Like practicing anything you like, it feels fun, not at all like work.
    I also learned about poetry’s art. The importance and effectiveness of expressing emotion by choosing the precise and necessary word; when short lines make sense to a reader (and myself as the first reader) or if long lines make more sense; how to evoke a scent or sound. These are all practical aspects that can be taught and learned. 
    Practice is the only way to make the craft shine and tune its artful ear. And some people get really good. Who doesn’t remember Amanda Gorman’s inaugural speech? Her words soared. Her delivery thrust them into a gorgeous dance of excitement, hope, and encouragement. 
    Youth Poet Laureates are named through a submission process and judged by a panel of leaders of national literary and arts organizations. Through the program begun in 2017, the Youth Poet Laureate is a young activist who uses poetry to encourage others to work for social change.
    The official title of the Poet Laureate of the United States, though, is “Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry.” Before 1986, people who held the position were referred to as “Consultants in Poetry.” Originally, Consultants served as aides to the Library of Congress. They evaluated the Library’s collection and made recommendations.              
    An act of Congress in 1986 added the title “Poet Laureate” and defined the duties to include organizing local poetry readings, lectures, conferences, and outreach programs. The Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry, acts as an ambassador bringing poetry to the people. 
    Our current Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry is Ada Límon whose appointment was announced in July, 2022, by Carla Hayden, Librarian of Congress. She said of Ms. Límon’s work, “Her accessible, engaging poems ground us in where we are and who we share our world with. They speak of intimate truths, of the beauty and heartbreak that is living, in ways that help us move forward.”
    Ms. Límon said of her own work, “I have been witness to poetry's immense power to reconnect us to the world, to allow us to heal, to love, to grieve, to remind us of the full spectrum of human emotion.” 
    Specific duties of the Poet Laureate are kept to a minimum. A couple of years ago when Tracey K. Smith served in the position, she started a podcast called “Slowdown.” Ada Límon is the current host, but will relinquish that position at the end of October. Find today’s broadcast (9/6/22) here.  
    When she opens the Library of Congress’s literary season reading her work in the Coolidge Auditorium, Ms. Límon begins her Laureateship. Her term will end in April.
    She has been bringing poetry to the people, though, since she published her first work in 2006. Her most recent book of poetry is The Hurting Kind. 
    If you haven’t read poetry in a while, give Ada Límon’s work a try. If you’ve never read a book of poetry, now’s a good time to start!
                -—be curious! (and keep a poem in your pocket)