About Me

My first job after I graduated college was at the Penn Bookstore in Philadelphia, a two-story building filled and bursting with books of every genre and language. I wore ties and answered phones, ran up and down the labyrinthine layout in constant pursuit of the books the customer required at that instant, until a sudden change in personnel required that I take over the children’s section full-time, and there was I reassigned – quarantined – a section separated from the rest of the store, filled with talking bunnies, Disney cartoons, Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew and a vast plethora of colorful, googly-eyed literature I’d never known existed.

I wasn’t exactly thrilled. During the afternoons, it was filled with screaming children and their boorish parental figures, tearing books from the shelves, pages from the books, urinating on our carpet, grape-jelly thumbprints along all fifty-four volumes of the Animorphs series, the eponymous wide-mouth from The Wide-Mouthed Frog Pop-up laying eviscerated beside newly crayola-filled pages of Captain Underpants.

There was one section of the Children’s Department which did have appeal for me, however. “Multicultural Picture Books,” it was called, and consisted of just two shelves composed of hundreds and hundreds of razor-thin books. There were no face-outs. It was practically impenetrable. You’d have to have come equipped with a high-powered magnifying lens to make sense of the miniature titles and author names imprinted along the spines.

Is that where it started? As an adult, yes. But I would like to think that the seeds were there from a much earlier time, as a child, voraciously devouring any and all books from the local library, enacting the tales with toys and action figures, wandering about through my neighborhood and envisioning the stories playing out before me, myself as the protagonist. All children are filled with stories and a love of storytelling, and perhaps the sense that there is something to the stories which is larger than merely the words and pictures.

The section was organized alphabetically by the authors’ last names, so patterns weren’t initially clear. It was a dense hodgepodge. Soon, however, after much browsing, it became apparent to me that within these shelves existed at least a dozen versions of Cinderella, of Jack, the Giant Slayer, of Red Riding Hood, and that they were from all over the world, each written and illustrated uniquely. They were all the same story, but they were not the same story. I suppose I had always known that these were all old stories, but never really given it much thought. The Cinderella story, after all, is not merely a Disney cartoon, but exists in every time period and in every culture. It was first written down in Ancient Greece and from there began crossing oceans and continents, worming itself into the unconscious of storytellers everywhere.

Thus began a lengthy reorganization project, which I conducted in my spare time, to pass the hours of the day. I placed like-minded books alongside like-minded books, so that the patterns could be more discernible. Suddenly, all of the Trolls Beneath the Bridge were grouped together. All of the Snow White tales. All of the West-African tricksters. It made sense to me, anyway.

I took on the weekly children’s storytime in the store, in an attempt to share as many of these books as I could. I began to collect my favorites by combining my paltry salary with my in-store discount. I came home with the magical fantasies of the Czech illustrators Peter Sis and Drahos Zak; the mythic, geometric world of Gerald McDermott, the folk tales based on songs by Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie, all lined up nicely on my bookshelf, so that I could take them down and read them whenever I wished.

In just a few months, I emptied my bank account not to go on an all-night boozing tour of the city, not to see a rock concert, but to take an all night Greyhound from Philadelphia to Tennessee. Some 12 hours later, as the sun was just rising, I rubbed the sand from my eyes and stepped off in Johnson City. I walked the train tracks until I got to Jonesborough where the largest annual storyteller convention occurs every year. I was able to watch firsthand as the late Pete Seeger, aging yet spry, told the tale of Abiyoyo with banjo in hand, which is a memory I’ll always cherish.

Now, nearly a decade later, my life has changed in many ways. I am a husband, I am a homeowner, and I am a father. But I still righteously love stories of every variety and the people who tell them. I tell stories to the children at our local Farmer’s Market and at our annual Earth Day celebration. Every year I adopt a kid through the city’s wonderful PhillyReads program. And every week, my son and I take a trip to our local library, and return home with a canvas bag nearly tearing at the seams with books.

I’m always certain to select something from the folklore section, something timeless.  I read, he listens and absorbs.  How many four-year olds do you know who can define “trickster?”

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