Current Issue: Fall/Winter 2010

The Word-Loving Dragon  
Rachel Contreni-Flynn

Seven years ago, I was propped up in bed in the stunningly bright sunshine of late August in Evanston, Illinois, with my newborn daughter snugged up to me, burrito-ed in her green checked blanket. The room was also stunningly quiet, actually, since my husband had gone back to work and since tiny babies peep rather than scream (who knew?). The tumbler of water at the bedside was absolutely still. Giant black flies roosted like overcoat buttons sewed to the screens. The hairline crack up the wall never edged taller, not even a whisper-bit. I watched all these things avidly and silently and found them strange. Overall, I was strange – and silent -- and not in a good way.

Never get me wrong, my daughter was dearly wanted and adored, then as now. It's just that her arrival was pretty much a trauma-riven train wreck that left my spiritual, holistic Birth Plan in the gutter like a Taco Bell wrapper. It left my idea of myself as strong and competent crumbed-up like a snip of tortilla chip in that wrapper. I felt blunted. My body was going on without me, feeding the baby, being residually immense, and my brain was noting concrete facts. Like the peeping, the tumbler, the flies. I'd stalled out, stunned. I imagined myself as a boundary marker, a big, cement pylon in a harvested field. To hear and see just something, I slid a colorful disk that lay atop a pile of shower gifts into the DVD player.

My first thought was that I wouldn't speak of this– that is, any tv watching during the baby's waking spells -- to my husband. Like most first-time, way left, overly educated, sweetly ridiculous but also frequently annoying, parents, we'd agreed that television in any form was not acceptable, necessary, healthy, useful, proper, or to-be-allowed for our child. Our child would crave books, as we do (except when watching Friends re-runs or, say, Sex in the City episodes night after night as I lolled, eating frosted white cake, a week, and then more, overdue). Ahem. We were not permitting tv or processed sugar or Chuck E. Cheese or even squirt guns or gender stereotypes. . . and as I write, my kids scamper past, one clutching a naked Barbie doll, the other palming sugar wafers in all three colors. And. . . scene. Whatever.

My second thought was, "Snow is a mind falling, a continuous breath/of climbs, loops, spirals,/dips into the earth like white fireflies." The screen speckled with snow and glitter and loveliness while a calm, light voice read Steve Crow's poem, Revival. And the stunned boundary marker in the field shifted just a smidge. It began to chip free wonderfully but not attractively (snuffing and snotting had ensued) by the time the mild voice read Galway Kinnell's The Apple Tree, ". . .the unfallen apples/hold their brightness/a little longer into the blue air, hold the idea/that they can be brighter" while boughs of gorgeous, glossy Red Delicious fruit bobbed in the breeze. It seemed I might, just might, be able to hold an idea. Not necessarily an idea that I could be brighter, but some sort of idea.

So, yes, the book that returned me, revived me, jump-started me back to the rich, quirky life of words and images and poetry I love is Baby Einstein's Baby Shakespeare, a digital board book – "an exciting 30-minute exploration of vocabulary words common to infants and toddlers. . .with interesting real-world visuals and the music of Beethoven, hosted by Bard, the word-loving dragon," according to the cartoon-emblazoned disk jacket. Sure, there were plenty of zooming and putt-putting toy cars and trains and wheeled farm animals in amongst the short poems and Symphony No. 9, but I thought those were just fine, too. I liked those colors. I liked that simple happiness. I thought maybe I could get me some of that, and bring it to my daughter. We, too, could be word-loving dragons, taking "a walk in the heavenly grass/All night while the lonesome stars rolled past." (Tennessee Williams, Baby Shakespeare!)

There's a fair bit of hating that goes on among the parental set toward Julie Aigner Clark -- founder of the Baby Einstein Company – she of the mild voice and the disembodied hand that gently and deliberately places and presses toys into place on the videos . I suppose that's because she's lavishly blonde, lavishly wealthy, lavishly lucky (Rachel's Neighbor: Geez, anyone could videotape toys in front of a black curtain and play some concert music. Rachel thinks: Uh, but ya didn't.). But I kind of love Julie. I love that digital board book. I refused to sell it when we hauled armloads of Max & Ruby, Thomas the Tank Engine, Barney (thank God), and Elmo videos out to the yard sale. Every time I brush my daughter's hair before she plows out the door to 2nd grade, I call her Loveliest of Trees, intoning mildly just like Julie reading the A.E. Housman poem while the video shows first a riot of cherry blossoms, followed by an avalanche of foam bowling balls.

I don't think it matters what book (or person or platitude or, frankly, snack food item) saves you or changes you or reclaims you, only that it does and that you receive and respond. Listen up all you closeted-fans of Rod McKuen or Anne Rivers Siddons. . . ! Our house is outrageously crammed with lots of really thinky, famous, spectacular books. Not a one of them was useful when I was stunned and empty. What I needed and gratefully found were my essentials: a few clear words, soaring music, vibrant colors. The simple happiness of a word-loving dragon. The Loveliest of Trees.

Rachel Contreni Flynn is the author of Tongue, which won the Benjamin Saltman Award and was published in 2010 by Red Hen Press, Ice, Mouth, Song (Tupelo Press, 2005), winner of the Dorset Prize, and the chapbook, Haywire (Bright Hill Press, 2009). She was awarded a Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts in 2007. Her work has often been nominated for Pushcart Prizes, and she received two literature grants from the Illinois Arts Council. She is an instructor in poetry at Northwestern University and a graduate of Indiana University and the Warren Wilson College MFA Program. Rachel lives north of Chicago with her husband and their two children.