"Daddy, here's a joke: what is a pig's favorite artist?"
"I think I know this one, is it Pig-casso?"
"No, it's Rem-pig."
In Patricia MacLachlan's 1986 Newbery acceptance speech - which she joked might have been longer than her fifty-page novella that actually won the medal - she pulled out her favorite sentence from her story:
"Sarah speaks for me and my mother, for whom there are few words left, when she writes in the book: “My brother William is a fisherman, and he tells me that when he is in the middle of a fogbound sea the water is a color for which there is no name.” This is my favorite sentence in the book, and I know why. It is my attempt to say what I have always thought and only been able to say in Sarah’s voice: that words are limiting, an odd thing for a writer to say. There is an entire world, complex and layered and full, behind each word or between words, that is often present but not spoken. And it is often what is left unsaid that shapes and empowers a moment, an experience, a book. Or a life. Actors know this. Musicians know it, too."
There is an awful lot left unsaid in Sarah, Plain And Tall, the story of a late-1800s widower brave enough to get a mail-order bride to help him take care of his two young children. I wrote that as a laugh line, but in reality it's a very good book. Strong-willed Mainer Sarah Wheaton moves to the Midwestern frontier after the aforementioned widower, whose wife died in childbirth, answers her newspaper personal ad1, and begins caring for his two young children. One of those children, Anna, narrates the story as well, and is a little apprehensive about the new member of her household and whether she's really going to like the plains better than Maine; Anna's younger brother, Caleb, is desperate for her to stay, desperate to have someone to sing to him again, overjoyed where Sarah scribbles at the bottom of one of her letters "tell them I sing." Early in the story, Caleb tells his dad “You don’t sing anymore,” tells him that “Maybe, if you remember the songs, then I might remember her, too," and soon enough, Sarah teaches new songs to the family, and Papa "sang as if he had never stopped singing."
But, again, there is a lot left unsaid, because this is a story about family, and families leave a lot unsaid. As MacLachlan pointed out, there’s a lot out there in the world that words just cannot cover, especially when it comes to family and love.
Alright, so: yesterday evening I had to go to the drugstore to pick up a few things, and because of how everyone’s schedule worked out, both of my daughters came with me2. The one-year-old, she’s actually pretty easy to take to the drugstore, she can just roll around in the stroller and is generally too mesmerized by all the great stuff in the drugstore to be too fussy. But the four-year-old, she’s on foot, she’s walking with me down every aisle, she’s picking up literally every object and saying “we should get this”, and not just like every candy item either, she’s picking up like various concealers and plumbing supplies as well, she just likes picking things up and getting my attention. And I’m in full autopilot “no sweetie we’re not getting that today” mode on everything, and eventually - because I have no idea where the actual thing is that I’m supposed to pick up - we end up in the aisle with all of the safety razors, and the four-year-old asks “what are these?” I say “those are razors, sweetie”, and she - I swear to god this is true - stares at me with a big grin on her face and wordlessly lifts the pack of safety razors above her head.
Because they’re raise-ers.
And I say “okay, sweetie, that’s…that’s pretty good. But we need to keep looking for this thing.” And she picks up each individual safety razor package that she can reach, just working her way down the line one by one to pick up and raise each individual pack of razors. It is, honestly, a very good bit.
I’ve mentioned in an earlier essay that I’m into Phish, the four-piece band from Vermont that has been playing six-hour live shows across the country for four decades. While my main use for Phish is to have one of their randomly-selected fifty live albums on as background noise while I work, I also will listen to Phish in the background when I play with my daughters, because their music doesn’t really have swears in it and it’s generally pretty happy. So my four-year-old knows that I’m into Phish. She’s even tried Phish Food, which is of course the Phish flavor of ice cream created by fellow Vermonters Ben and Jerry, and which is legitimately the best Ben and Jerry’s flavor overall.
A week or two ago, my daughter was off school and I was working as usual, so her mom/my wife took both kids to visit the Shedd Aquarium in downtown Chicago, always a great time. She got home and I finished work and we all played together a little bit, and then she said “Dad…” and she grinned, “guess what band we saw at the aquarium today?”
Last summer, we had a pirate phase, sparked by a few pirate-themed picture books and one visit to a pirate-themed theme park. This means that I was repeatedly injecting "YARRRR" into every conversation with my daughter, done in the Simpsons-Sea-Captain voice. Any place where I could squeeze in an extra sentence in a conversation that was usually about a swing set or an imaginary friend, I would throw in a "but guess what? YARRRR."
This began to escalate almost immediately. My daughter starting throwing in YARRRRs as well, usually repeating immediately after me but sometimes starting to punctuate her other thoughts with an “and also, YARRRR.” This also turned into a arms race of comedic timing between the two of us, with me seeing how long I could build up to, and how much of a pause I could put immediately before, the YARRR. “But sweetie? Okay. Okay, sweetie? Sweetie? I just need to make something very clear. Sweetie. You see, Sweetie. Sweetie? [Unbearably long pause]. YARRR.” That particular example was one we built up to, that one was like eight or nine steps in, you don’t just leap to that overnight. And, of course, she echoed all of this. “Daddy? Okay, but daddy… [Unbearably long pause]. YARRR.”
I don’t even know how to describe the “scary goodbye voice”. It’s a joke I kind-of stole from an old episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000. But basically, here’s the setup: if you’ve ever worked or lived with young children, whenever you leave literally any place, they (and you) will say goodbye to multiple inanimate objects. You say goodbye to the people you were talking to, and then the child will start saying things like "goodbye tree! Goodbye table!" And I thought it would be funny, once, to respond as one of the trees by saying "BYE, GUYS" in a terrifying low-pitched rasp, since that’s how (I assume) trees would talk. Thankfully, my daughter thought this was pretty funny, and now she just does this, all of the time, whenever we leave anywhere. If we’re at the beach, she says “bye beach!” and then immediately follows it with a truly scary and rumbly “BYE GUYS”. If we’re at the library, she says “bye books!” and then immediately follows it with a truly scary and rumbly “BYE GUYS”.
Once, my daughter was playing with her four-year-old cousin, blowing bubbles out in her grandpa’s backyard. And when her cousin had to leave, her cousin said bye to my daughter and then “bye-bye, bubbles!” to the remaining bubbles. And then my daughter immediately responded in Scary Goodbye Voice with “BYE!” which, thank God, the cousin thought was funny and not an unhinged weird thing that we just do in our household.
The girls are starting to do bits together. Their favorite one is to have one of them pretend to be asleep and then have the other one yell “WAKE UP!” and the fake asleep one yells “AAAA!” and they both laugh and laugh. You can hear their sense of timing getting better with each run-through (and they like to do this bit twelve times in a row).
They also love to play “Sandwich”, a game in which I put down a couch cushion, they lay down on top of it, and then I put another couch cushion on top of them. Then I “forget” that I did that, and go “wow I wonder where the kids are, oh well at least I can eat this delicious sandwich,” and as soon as I start making “om nom nom” noises, both of the girls say “hiiii!” and I start screaming uncontrollably, horrified that I've almost eaten my daughters like a modern-day Titus Andronicus. They love it.
Look, I'm part of the problem too, I get it.
In MacLachlan's Newbery acceptance speech, she also said this:
"When Julius Lester praises children’s literature as the “literature that gives full attention to the ordinary,” he echoes my parents’ belief that it is the daily grace and dignity with which we survive that children most need and wish to know about in books."
“Tell them I sing” carries a lot in Sarah, Plain and Tall. You know exactly what Caleb is asking when he wants to know if Sarah sings - that is, you know exactly what he misses about his mother, what daily grace he feels he can’t get from his father alone - and you know exactly what Sarah is trying to communicate when she writes that in the margins of a letter to Caleb’s father, even though almost none of it is said directly. But if you have been in a family, you get it. You get that there are things that mean so much, in the ways that we communicate to each other, that, when you explain them to an outsider, make you sound like an insane person. But that's the daily grace with which we have been blessed, the daily grace that MacLachlan depicts so well in the white spaces between her words.
I imagine, in some alternate universe where I was a lonely guy putting personal ads (dated reference) in the paper (dated reference) and looking to find a frontier wife (dated reference) and slowly starting to answer her mail correspondence (dated reference), I would, at some point, scribble a note to her to pass on to her children: “tell them I do bits.”
Newburied is a series by Tony Ginocchio on the history of the Newbery Medal and a whole bunch of other stuff related to it. You can subscribe via Substack to get future installments sent to your inbox directly. The next installment will cover the 1924 medalist, The Dark Frigate by Charles Boardman Hawes.
In the Emmy-winning made-for-TV movie adaptation, these two characters were portrayed by Glenn Close and Christopher Walken.
Generally on social media, because I don’t like using their real names, I refer to them as Meatball and Breadstick. But you’re all dedicated and kind readers, so I’m happy to tell you that their real names are Ariana Grande Ginocchio and Misato Katsuragi Ginocchio.