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The Spiritual in Our Writing
Human hunger for resonant meaning
Years ago I bought an old library copy of a picturebook called Frank and Zelda. We’d borrowed it many times, and my boys loved it in the way children do: we read it hundreds of times, and it was often the requested read when they were feeling ill (reserved for only the most favourite books).
Later I bought a second copy when the book was re-titled and re-issued as Pizza For Breakfast. I would share it with the classes I was teaching as an example of a children’s book with no child characters in it. The main characters are an old couple, along with an ageless person of indeterminate magic.
Other than the obvious draw of “pizza,” I was always left a bit awed by how much my boys loved that book: the theme of the book was very “adult.”
Or was it?
It’s a story of having wishes answered and then grow out of control, with a final act of wishing the wishes had never taken place. That’s an old story-line; it’s been done many times. But in the closing image Zelda and Frank are at the beach, having given up their enormous pizza restaurant, and they have instead a no-room-to-move pizza caravan with no customers and they’re enjoying the sun in their lounge chairs. The closing lines are about their being happy: “And this time they knew it.”
A story of acceptance, gratitude, contentment.
Resonant — and ‘that’ face
Years later, that story kept coming to me through my months of caregiving, and when I wrote my memoir of that time, I wanted to include the closing lines. By then the book was out-of-print, and I had to write directly to writer/illustrator Maryann Kovalski to ask her permission to quote from her story, to which she generously said “yes.”
If you look up various reviews, they say it’s a story about “be careful what you wish for.” But it’s more than that ‘lesson.’ It’s one of a handful of picturebooks that have stayed with my boys for years and now as adults they’ll pick it up if they see it on top of one of my piles, and a particular look will come over their faces. “I remember this one.”
That’s a look and words that writers yearn to know through their work.
