If there is one thing I tend to be good at, it's making connections — between things, between people, between seemingly disparate events. I love when something makes me look at the world in a completely different way or prompts me to link two ideas or facts that I previously might never have included in the same sentence.
It's for the same reason that I love the weekly radio program "This American Life," produced by Chicago Public Radio. Even for a perpetual connector of dots like me, TAL is the ultimate ear candy. Each week Ira Glass and his staff of documentarians choose a theme, find stories to fit that theme, then splice them together into an hour-long broadcast that is always insightful, often surprising, and frequently very, very funny, at least in parts. I have had more "ah-ha!" moments listening to TAL than I could begin to count, and the best part is that even when I listen to the same broadcast multiple times (and, yes, I sometimes do this), I experience those moments all over again.
What does this have to do with children's books? A couple of months ago TAL did a program with the theme "My Brilliant Plan," in which each of the stories was about someone who had had a brilliant plan of one sort or another that (as you might guess) didn't turn out exactly the way they had hoped.
Such was the case for Ronald Mallett, as explained in Act II of "My Brilliant Plan," called "Tragedy Minus Time Equals Happily Ever After." When Ron was ten years old, his father died suddenly of a heart attack. A year later Ron's life was markedly changed when he read the Classics Illustrated comic book edition of The Time Machine by H.G. Wells. Ron became obsessed with the idea of building a time machine that would enable him to travel back to the 1950's, so that he could warn his (then young) father that he needed to take better care of himself or he would die at an early age.
When Ron's initial attempt to build a time machine failed, he didn't assume that his overall plan was flawed or that time travel was impossible. He assumed that because he'd read an abridged version of Wells' classic story, he must be lacking some key details. So he read the original, unexpurgated version of The Time Machine and tried again. And again. And again. And again. For more than fifty years.
Today Ron Mallett is a well-respected physicist whose field of expertise is (yes) time travel. He's even written a book about his career path — the one that began with his reading what we in the children's book business frequently refer to as "the right book at the right time."
It's the idea of "the right book at the right time" that makes it such a joy to put books in the hands of children and young adults. I love knowing that the potential exists for them to take the ideas and stories on these pages and build entire futures out of them — perhaps not on a scale as wide-reaching as that of Ron Mallett, but certainly on one that lasts as long. Take me, for example. I think of Nancy Drew every time I switch on a flashlight. I think of Bill and Pete every time I buy a toothbrush.
And I think of "This American Life" every time I sell a copy of The Borrowers. After you've listened to Ron Mallett's story, do yourself the favor of listening to Act Four, "Age of Enchantment" from TAL episode 106, originally broadcast on Father's Day, 1998. In it you will feel the pain of a father confessing how he wrote letters to his young daughter, pretending to be the member of a family living within their basement walls. His on-air conversation with his daughter is one you will never forget.
I also recommend listening to yesterday's radio treat, delivered not by the Easter Bunny but by "Studio 360" (another insightful program on public radio). The entire episode was devoted to The Great Gatsby and the entire episode was GREAT.