Becoming the Friendly Giraffe
February 5, 2006
On Labor Day, I became a mother. Knowing how much I value literature and writing, my friends and family members showered my son with books. Many of these were favorites from their own childhood -- some even donated their original copies to our collection. "Goodnight Moon," "Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs," "Where the Wild Things Are". . . There are too many classics to list, and I’ve enjoyed sharing them all with Lucas even though he’s only five months old.
Two books, however, stood out from the rest. These are "My Circus Story with the Friendly Giraffe," given to me by my parents, and "My Jungle Holiday with the Friendly Giraffe," passed on by my grandmother. These books, printed in the mid-1970s by the Me-Books Publishing Company, were personalized for the recipient, so the gondolas on the Ferris wheel each bear my childhood friends’ names, fireworks spell “Leslie,” and the friendly giraffe has been dubbed Eilsel, my name in reverse.
I loved these books as a child, in large part because they personalized the reading experience for me. I want to do the same for Lucas, to encourage him to take ownership of stories and knowledge, to make them relevant to his life and to help him understand his place in an increasingly turbulent world.
As a teaching assistant and instructor at UC Davis and elsewhere, I’ve met hundreds of students who somewhere along the line became disenchanted with reading, and I’ve sought, with varying degrees of success, to reinvigorate their reading experiences with the kind of wonder we experience when we read as children. I wish I could, as did “the magic computer” of the Me-Books Publishing Company, insert their names into every text, to remind them they are part of a larger conversation, that their minds aren’t just temporary receptacles for the books’ content until the midterm. Unfortunately, accomplishing this feat isn’t really as easy as creating "The Feminine Mystique with the Friendly Giraffe" or "The Autobiography of Malcolm X with the Friendly Giraffe."
As one who comes from an extended family of public school teachers and perpetual students, I can’t understand how someone with leisure time could not embrace the life of the mind, might not grasp every opportunity to exchange ideas in person, in print, or online. If I could pass only one thing on to my son, it would be this desire to become part of a learning community, the ability to insert myself into any text with or without the aid of the friendly giraffe. As Lucas navigates his world, I’ll lend him my personal compass, which is engraved with “Read everything. Love learning. Democratize knowledge.”