“How the Lost Get Found (and stop getting pound. . .ed)” for #nerdybookclub December 2011

We had a real editing challenge on Friday morning (December 9th) #nerdybookclub asks guests who post to keep their entries to 1000 words or fewer. Here is “Where the Lost Get Found (and stop getting pound. . .ed)” in its entirety. It helps to fill in some of the blanks of the shorter post and allows me some space to expound upon some of my thinking while drafting this piece. Please enjoy them both.

 

A

“Where the Lost Get Found (and stop getting pound. . .ed)”

I remember the first time I heard this song on a local Christian music station. “It’s where the lost get found.” I think I have known this place since I was four years old.  I remember this place where the lost get found as distinctly as I remember Santa Claus coming one year. . .and not coming the next. I remember this place wherein hymns became “songs,” sermons became “talks,” and church became a “hall.” I remember this place and it really has nothing to do with some grand theological bordering upon an It’s a Wonderful Life kind of post.

The place I remember is books.

How inviting is it to a group of readers that the opening of what many refer to as “the good book (but I have yet to see it called the best book in the forums I frequent—must be some failing in marketing or the lack of an eye-popping trailer)” that it reads in the beginning was the word. As a reader, I’m sold. Right there. It gives me great comfort that words have been, words are, and words will be.

And when Santa stopped making house calls to our mobile home in Northern Michigan, my family and I, under the guidance of others in our congregation made door-to-door calls of our own. Perhaps you have met me in some other  time, in some other place, on some other porch. At the age of five, I could cite verses from Hebrew scripture as easily as I could unpack symbolism as found in the Revelation According to John.  I studied from Watchtower Society publications including The Watchtower, Awake, My Book of Bible Stories, and the introductory piece for all young Jehovah’s Witnesses, the gentle pink colored Listening to the Great Teacher.  In preparation for Sunday meetings, I would sit in my small room and prepare by reading the questions at the bottom of each page and dutifully “underlining” the correct responses I might volunteer to give when the time came (please note, this post is not an instruction piece on the rituals found within the Watchtower Society, but I think this demonstrates that this group had a leg up on Harvey Daniels in regard to reading, responding, reflecting, and reporting out as part of a small study group—these happened on Tuesday evenings in the homes of volunteer hosts).

When I entered Kindergarten—in compliance with man’s law, I looked for familiar books, but I couldn’t find anything that looked the friendly, smiling, bearded face of my Jesus. . .my Great Teacher. I found Ms. Luttman, who probably thought me to the great oddity as early on as October when I finished cutting an orange globe from construction paper and asking, “What do I do when I am done?” And after a tenuous meeting between my mother and my teacher, there was one perfect orange circle on the wall, a representation of the sun among the snaggle-toothed faces of Babylon the Great.

Monday through Friday I attended school. And I learned phonics, how to cut along the lines, the joyful taste of carefully prepared paste, the strategic play of “The Farmer and Dell (there are ways to avoid being the cheese as much as there are ways of completely dropping off the face of the earth), and the responsibility of making sure the milk cartons were delivered one to a person as the prescribed time.

But on Tuesday evenings, I studied the book assigned at the time by the Kingdom Hall. I listened to my father read, something he never did aloud at home. I thought my father was a slow reader. He had a hard time pronouncing words and I could feel the uncomfortable shiftings of the others in our circular group as he tried to get through the next section of reading. My father could not read. And to this day, he has great difficulty with the written and spoken word. All that was asked of him was that he “bark at the book” each week and underline the correct answer in response to the questions posed by the Watchtower Society authors (when I was a member of this faith, expounding upon the underlined response was frowned upon by the elders. Only elders were allowed to quantify a response found within the text provided).

My father could not read. But I could. And I read dutifully. And I continued to look for books that looked like the ones I had at home (having read them through a number of times, I was looking for more along the same lines). And the well-intended Ms. Luttman gave me books about hippos and books that offered half-handed explanations for why mosquitoes buzzed in peoples ears with absolutely no mention of Jehovah whatsoever. How misinformed. . .and seemingly this book won some kind of award. My reward was waiting for me because of my ability to see the error in the explanation. My attempts to communicate this to Ms. Luttman, somewhere about the time my Pilgrims looked like extras from Mission Impossible or outright ninjas of the Mayflower, we found ourselves once again in a meeting with my mother. And I looked for things to read.

At Christmas time of my Kindergarten year, when my attempt at yuletide expression looked like an over-sized air freshener among the glittery, off-kilter triangular offerings of my classmates, I thought that I would continue to be left out. I could not be in the room when Ms. Luttman read The Night Before Christmas. I had never seen the Grinch everyone else was talking about. The hallway became a club of one. One faithful boy. . .looking for something to read.

I was a favorite target of my bullying classmates and I often hid behind the cement cheese climber that stood like an orange post-it flag in the middle of the Ottawa Elementary playgroup. They were tired of my attempts to draw life lessons from the Hebrews who mishandled the manna provided, or why Jezebel’s launching from the upper window to dogs below was a justifiable decision that could only be made by the great I AM, or my take on eschatology. Nor did they really care that I was working on gesticulation that week for Thursday evening’s Theocratic Ministry school where young Witnesses are trained to prepare talks and to deliver them (I carried my talk notes in my pocket complete with notes in the margin for what I would do with my hands at that precise moment).

They beat me up. And they told me there was not one person at Ottawa Elementary that would help me because they all hated “Jehovahs.” I was alone. I was lost. But I had been warned about this kind of treatment by my peers in the weekly meetings. Stories told there were filled with examples of the persecuted. If I couldn’t take a little beating behind the cheese for Jehovah, I certainly wasn’t worthy of being a part of his Kingdom.

I found one way to keep the bullies from beating me up one day. I could make them laugh. I’d poke fun at myself, or I would recite some joke from Reader’s Digest (I began to seek out other reading materials and I had self-identified myself as a reader). My classmates, whose humor catalog was found lacking what with only dirty limericks and knock-knock jokes, were impressed with my ability to remember whole stories that would end in some unexpected punchline or incongruity.

I’m hardwired to abuse anything I like or find pleasurable. Hang around me long enough and you will begin to detect this right away. If it is good. I want more. Take a look at my classroom or writing room. I like books. So when I found humor as a mechanism for not being beat up, I sought out more and more books that would allow me to be funny, but allow me to be clean at the same time.

I read Tom Swifties. I read trivia books. I read funny books.

And then I found. . .Al Jaffee’s Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions.

And from that moment on, I became. . .baptized. . .in the snark that would seemingly become my trademark. . .or quite possibly my least-likable trait. I try to temper this, but I never know what the intentions of another person might be. There’s always someone out there that would like nothing more than to beat somebody up. I’m ready with a joke. . .like, “Cross this line if you want to fight. Wait a beat. There. . .now we’re on the same side.”

I hid MAD magazines inside of my Watchtower publications. I loved the parodies, the fold-ins, the Spy vs. Spy pieces, the sound effects that accompanied Don Martin’s drawings, and the little cartoons Sergio Aragones hid in the margins of the longer stories from the classic issues. I found a real release in the ability to imagine what kinds of names I would give the elders of my Kingdom Hall if I were to create that two-page spread collage of spot-on representations of familiar characters rendered by Jack Davis that marked the opening of every satirical piece MAD offered readers.

I read CRACKED as a companion piece to MAD and pre-dated Teri Lesesne’s “reading ladder” concept (just kidding, Teri. . .you’re the queen, but you should be honored, I tossed Harvey Daniels under in the opening to this piece that is going far too long already). I sang the song parodies aloud in my backyard trying to get my voice to sound as close to the original recording artist as possible to make the song more authentic as well as properly-skewered.

And since this is #nerdybookclub, I should say that I eventually found that the creators and editors of MAD magazine would often pull together features from the magazine. And if I could find these in the school library, they were mine. And I would devour them.

I found myself in humor. In the release from the seriousness of knowing each year the number leading up to 144,000 was slowly dwindling and I was only seven. . .and I hadn’t finished my quota of house calls in the past month let alone do the week’s underline. I had read from my New Translation of the Hebrew and Greek Scriptures that Jehovah would open up the earth and swallow folks for less (this is a good time to repeat. . .humor and reading humorous material helped me to escape this kind of thinking).In the skewering of the otherwise exclusionary and painful.

In holding something up to the light and finding out it’s not really windfall in that envelope at all.

It’s a pratfall.

We can laugh.

And this is how a lost kid got found in books. How many times do we say—fellow club members—that it is not what we find in the book, but what the book finds within us? These magazines and collections found within me the cleansing power of laughter. I could laugh when my Easter egg tacked to an April bulletin board looked as fresh as when it left the chute, a tribute to Mork from Ork among the multitudes of ovals with ill-planned zig-zag configurations.

Today, I find Chris Crutcher’s ability to find a chuckle inside of the chaos of the adolescent condition so reminiscent of my own , I have to wonder if he had been following me around my school, undetected by me being so fixated on the film-making genius of John Hughes. I think David Macinnis Gill is an absolute stitch. I secretly wish that Tom Angelberger and I grew up together. I wish David Lubar had been my fourth-grade teacher (I mean honestly, can’t you see this weinie man actually pulling lunch duty?). I think Lane Smith and Jon Scieszka  are delivering young readers from places they may or may not have even considered.  I think that Alan Sitomer has written middle grade’s Citizen Kane with his The Downside of Being Up. And excuse me for being a little sophomoric, but Don Calame’s Swim the Fly is like Porky’s meets Of Mice and Men.

And so that this love-fest of funny authors does not seem gender imbalanced, I think Lisa Yee, Lauren Myracle, and Carolyn Mackler are an absolute hoot. Have you ever had an interaction with Pamela Ross or Kristin Clark Venuti? And a tweet here and there from Libba Bray reminds me that are reasons to laugh in this world still. All of these authors are like my crazy uncles and aunts I’ve never had. And I love them all.

Because the prologue of every book they write seems to be written in invisible ink that only I can read. I can share with you how each reads now: “Dear Paul. . .pull my finger. And then turn the page.”

These books are the tools of deliverance. And they are a part of me as much as the Watchtower publications I read as a child. And this is why I can say with the highest degree of confidence that comedy must be part of any curriculum and we need to find it and include it within any proposed canon. David Macinnis Gill says that a book becomes part of the canon as soon as it is covered by one teacher with one group of students. It’s time to put some mirth the methods, my friends.

And we need to honor choice. Even when the kid brings in the new collection of Fold-Ins being released early this spring (I sense that Tom Angleberger and I will be tweeting out about these soon). Even when you know that the senior carrying around David Sedaris’s Squirrel Loves Chipmunk could use some reader advisory (by the way, if you call me, I will read stories from this book to you complete with animal voices).

And if nothing else, my early reading experiences taught me a reverence for literary tradition. Honestly, not many Biblical allusions get past the pasta strainer that is my brain. But humor was, is, and will probably always be the amazing grace that found me when I was lost and made me feel something other than dread and trepidation. . .and loneliness.

Pull my finger. It’s a kind of com-ic-union between two people who might share a giggle. It’s brought me this far.

B

 

By the way, if you were to fold this post so that A meets B, you would find a new parody written especially for #nerdybookclub. Well, not really. . .but wouldn’t that have been cool, Tom?

 

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