1993: MISSING MAY by Cynthia Rylant
When May died, Ob came back to the trailer, got out of his good suit and into his regular clothes, then went and sat in the Chevy for the rest of the night.
My oldest daughter and I have graduated to novels at bedtime, one chapter a night. But she still really likes pictures, and is still insisting on color pictures in whatever I pick to read for her. The only children’s novel with full-color pictures that I had on my shelf was Charlotte’s Web, so we read that one first, and you already know what I think about that one. I bought a full-color version of Charlie And The Chocolate Factory to read to her next, and she loved that one. But for the third book, she picked my graphic novel adaptation of A Wrinkle In Time (adapted by Hope Larson), and I kind of tried to dissuade her from that, because, well, there’s a lot going on in that book and I honestly didn’t think she’d find it all that interesting at her age, certainly not as much fun as Charlie And The Chocolate Factory. But she wanted to do it, because it had a lot of pictures in it - it’s a graphic novel, it’s all pictures - and the pictures were kind of blue-tinted so they count as color pictures, and I, for some reason, happen to own several graphic novel adaptations of my favorite science fiction books and this was closer to age-appropriate than The Golden Compass (adapted by Stéphane Melchoir) or Slaughterhouse-Five (adapted by Ryan North and Albert Monteys). So we jumped in, and we’re reading it now, and we just finished chapter seven, “The Man with Red Eyes”, in which Meg and Calvin and Charles Wallace make it to CENTRAL Central Intelligence on Camazotz and Charles Wallace is hypnotized by some robotic agent of IT, the disembodied brain whom we have not yet met, who deceives the gang by offering them fake food and trying to drive their brains into a stupor by chanting the multiplication tables in rhythm. So, after each chapter, including that one, I stop and ask my daughter, “okay, sweetie, you still like the book? You want to keep going?” And she says yes. So we do it again the next night.
I don’t think she’s going to “get” all of Wrinkle this time around. I’ve read it a lot more times than she has, and I still don’t get all of it. But I don’t really expect her to get any of it to be honest. I hope she remembers that she asked her dad to read her a book and her dad read her that book. Maybe someday she’ll remember that it was this particular book, but that’s less important to me.
Another, shorter set of books that both of my daughters enjoy is the Poppleton series, about a pig who moves from the city to a quieter life in the suburbs, but gets to know his quirky neighbors and reveals that he has a couple of quirks of his own. These are short early-reader chapter books and they're very delightful. But my copy lists the author as “Newbery medal winner Cynthia Rylant”, and - for a guy who normally paid some level of attention to this sort of thing - I had never heard of Cynthia Rylant before. Not only was Rylant a Newbery winner, she won in 1993! A Newbery medalist in the nineties, I thought I had read every single one of those, back at the age when I was the exact target audience for these books! But somehow I missed this one, and I don't think I was alone: the nineties medalists included some absolute powerhouses of children's literature, these big famous genre-busting books that still influence writers today, like The Giver or Holes or Maniac Magee, and by comparison, 1993 medalist Missing May can seem kind of slight at first glance. It’s less than a hundred pages long, and it’s primarily about grief, and yeah it’s kind of a Story Where Everyone Learns From Grief And Comes Out Stronger In The End, but it’s one of the best entries I’ve ever read in that genre, because of its tight focus on what it is that gets us through grief.
Our narrator is Summer, who, after losing her parents at a young age, got passed around to various aunts and uncles who never really wanted to take care of her, until she landed with her elderly uncle Ob and aunt May in West Virginia, the latter of whom dies shortly before the novel begins. As Summer remembers on page 7:
“May turned me to the kitchen, where she pulled open all the cabinet doors, plus the refrigerator, and she said ‘Summer, whatever you like you can have and whatever you like that isn’t here Uncle Ob will go down to Ellet’s Grocery and get you. We want you to eat, honey.’ Back in Ohio, where I’d been treated like a homework assignment somebody was always having to do, eating was never a joy of any kind. Every house I had ever lived in was so particular about its food, and especially when the food involved me. There’s no good way to explain this. But I felt like one of those little mice who has to figure out the right button to push before its food will drop down into the cup. Caged and begging. That’s how I felt sometimes. My eyes went over May’s wildly colorful cabinets, and I was free again…glistening Coke bottles and chocolate milk cartons to greet me. I was six years old and I had come home.”
This is small, right? Ok great, you’re making sure the kid gets the groceries she likes. But that’s a big deal - a very big deal, a thing you think about all of the time - when you’re a kid getting passed around from family to family and never really feeling at home. The knowledge that somebody there actually cares whether you feel at home or not, that you don’t have to perform for them, that matters. And moving examples like that, of these small signs of love that keep us going, things that we end up remembering as we’re grieving, are all over Missing May. Even though Summer sets us up with this early in the novel, she’s still surprised to hear it from someone else, like when Ob starts reminiscing about his late wife:
“Ob talked about what a good wife May was and all the sweet things she’d done for him - for us - while she was living. I was kind of surprised at the things Ob picked to talk about. I figured he’d choose the big ones - like her secretly saving up for three years in a row to buy him that expensive plane saw he was covering over at Sears. Or the year she stayed awake thirty-two hours straight when fever from the chicken pox had me full of delirium, so sick I wanted to die. But these heroic gestures of hers were ignored, and he chose instead to mention the simpler things: how she had rubbed down his ailing knee with Ben-Gay every single night, not missing a one, so he might be able to stand on that leg when he got out of bed the next morning. The way she had called to me through the window when I was little and playing on the swing set, saying, “Summer honey, you are the best little girl I ever did know,” then going back to whatever she was doing. (I had not remembered this about her until that moment.)”
Now, there's a short major plotline in this book, too: Ob, drowning in grief and desperate to try anything to get over May, plans a road trip with Summer and one of Summer's classmates to go see a Spiritualist - think mediums, contacting the dead, tapping tables - to try and contact May. But they find out, once they get there, that the medium they were going to see actually passed away herself a year ago, and they kind of all realize what a stupid idea the whole thing was, and Ob seems pretty ashamed of himself on the drive back home, but pulls it together and takes his two young passengers on a pleasant day trip to the state capitol building in Charleston before they get back home. The medium being dead was actually a pretty good, darkly funny plot twist that I was not expecting, although given the wry sense of humor of the Poppleton series, that's on me for underestimating Cynthia Rylant. It made for a nice little story. But the book isn't about the trip to the dead medium, it's about what you remember about the people who leave you, whether you plan to remember them or not.
Obviously I don’t know what my kids are going to remember me for after I die (if I ever die). I’m pretty sure I’m not as good a person as May was, although to my credit May isn’t real. I probably would stay awake for thirty-two hours straight if one of them was sick, although I can very easily see myself complaining about it while it was happening. And I don’t think they’re going to remember me as a brilliant writer or kickass activist or whatever else I’ve fantasized about being in the past. But I hope they remember that I was there, there for some small thing that I don’t even remember myself, like how in the final pages of the novel, Summer’s grief finally overwhelms her when an owl flies overhead and triggers a memory of being surprised by an owl one night with May. Just like Emily in World Of Tomorrow, facing the apocalypse and her death, holds one to one memory of seeing a rainbow with her mother. When Summer’s “body was emptied of those tears and I was no more burdened”, she tells Ob that “It’s been so hard missing May,” and Ob responds with “She’s still here, honey. People don’t ever leave us for good.” What follows, to close out the novel, is a tiny masterpiece of a three-page monologue from May - it’s not clear if it’s something she had told Summer before, or if she’s speaking from the afterlife, or, what I think is the best option narratively, Summer imagining all of the monologue in her head - remembering the owl incident with Summer, telling Summer again and again how much she was and is loved.
I hope I never leave them for good.
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 1975 medalist, M.C. Higgins, The Great by Virginia Hamilton.