On Being with Krista Tippett

I remember picking up his book, A Sand County Almanac in my brother's room and my brother's room was a place that that you ventured into at great peril.

Here's one way you just kind of summarize some of his admonitions that you kept with you to be to be one of those who cannot live without wild things. Keep all the parts, listen to the mountain and preserve the integrity, stability and beauty of the biotic community.

That says it all right. I mean, yeah, it's amazing. You know that if you can hoard if you can sort of hoard experiences, which I think is part of what I do along with books and other things. But if you can hoard experiences out there, then for me that that informs who I am.

So so seeing my father burn a piece of land to keep it productive or being out with him when he was cutting a tree and thinking about Leopold's good oak and thinking about the annual rings in that tree as history and not just how the tree grew, then then it it helps me understand and sort of re-find my place in the past, but also now.

Have you ever asked an auditorium full of kids if they know and love Charlotte's Web? In my experience, almost all the hands go up and if you ask them how many of them cried when they read it, most of those hands unabashedly stay aloft.

My childhood best friend read Charlotte's Web over and over again as a kid. She would read the last page, turn the book over, and begin again. A few years ago I asked her why. What was it that made you read and reread that book, I asked her? Did you think that if you read it again things would turn out differently, better, that Charlotte wouldn't die?

No, she said it wasn't that. I kept reading it not because I wanted it to turn out differently or thought that it would turn out differently but because I knew for a fact that it wasn't going to turn out differently. I knew that a terrible thing was going to happen and I also knew that it was going to be okay somehow.

I thought that I couldn't bear it but then when I read it again it was all so beautiful and I found out that I could bear it. That was what the story told me. That was what I needed to hear, that I could bear it somehow.

These autumn days will shorten and grow cold. The leaves will shake loose from the trees and fall. Christmas will come, then the snows of winter. You will live to enjoy the beauty of the frozen world for you mean a great deal to Zuckerman and he will not harm you ever.

This beautiful world had been available to me all along but I had never bothered to pick up the keys to the kingdom.

And she said you know she read all your books. It was the most satisfying literary adventure of her life also incredibly calming.

She said it was the first time that she really thought about, she had this experience in the story of many lives, I wrote this down, who magically affected each other and overlapped in some secret way.

That this was her first experience of that and of falling in love with multiple people and then this joy of realizing that their lives intertwined.

And just you know when she was growing up because of when Dixie was required reading for just a whole generation of kids and was for a while and probably still is in places.

And then and now she and then why did she tell. So then now there are you know then there are the kids who read Desperate or The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane.

And as far as we know this is still the only book he has ever read.

And to me I had this picture of you right? You Kate that was your first book.

I have respected your wishes. I have not come searching for you, but I have crossed the Florida Georgia state line many, many times since we last spoke.

And I look for you every time I cross over. I know that you will not be there, but I look anyway and I dream about you and my dream.

You are standing in front of the vending machine from the good night sleep tight and you're smiling at me using all of your teeth. You say select anything you want darling. Provisions have been made provisions have been made.

I am so happy when you show up in my dreams and say those words to me. Thank you for picking me up in the alley of Louisiana five and dime. Thank you for teaching me to sing.

I don't know if you made it to healthier or not, but I want you to know that there is no curse of sundering upon my head. I love you, granny. I forgive you.

And now more recently there's the generation of kids who've been for whom Flora and Ulysses is what they know of Kate DiCamillo and they may or may not remember because of when Dixie.

It has graphic novel elements.

And and also to this point of how kids know that the world is a hard place that she constantly refers to her favorite book which is called Terrible Things Can Happen To You exclamation point.

Which is not the book any of us would give our children but it's probably the one that they would understand.

Tell me is this Beatrice saying this instructing each letter has a shape and each letter has a sound and you put these shapes and sounds together and they become words. Do you understand? I he said to her his heart was beating fast.

He did not know he had not understood how much he wanted it to know the secret of letters and sounds and words but his heart pounding against his ribcage was telling him he watched the letters appear one by one beneath her hand and he felt as if each letter or a door pushed open inside of him a door that led to a lighted room.

Yeah. I say it's so I'm nodding my head as you read not because I it just that's how it feels you know. It just it's a bodily feeling.

And also to this point of how kids know that the world is a hard place that she constantly refers to her favorite book which is called Terrible Things Can Happen To You exclamation point.

If indeed God is holding us all in his hands, what capacious hands they must be.