On Day #19 of National Novel Writing Month, I decided to work on a scene that I knew would probably end up as one of my favorites in my children’s-book-to-be. In this dramatic and game-changing scene, Nettie Rabbit will face humiliation and rejection by her potential buck rabbit suitors. In order for the scene to work, I had to dig deep into my character’s interior life — to open the door to her heart, so to speak. How was Nettie feeling in this moment, one of the worst times in her young and fairly innocent life?
Like I often do, I tried to remember a time in my own life, preferably when I was a child, when I felt the same way. What came to mind was a 4-H Club Box Lunch Social at Muckey School when I was in either 5th or 6th grade. (I do remember that our 4-H club was trying to raise money to fund a proposed field trip, by bus, to Washington, DC.) No doubt the event was scheduled in February because I decorated my cardboard shoe box with red and pink construction paper hearts and white paper doilies. I packed the box with a special lunch for two: perhaps, egg salad sandwiches, potato chips, a pair of apples, and a half-dozen homemade oatmeal cookies, the kind for which I’d won a blue ribbon at the Waukesha County Fair.
Picture it: the early ’60’s. The preadolescent boys and girls in our rural Wisconsin community are dressed in their Sunday best. The decorated box lunches brought by the girls are lined up on a stage in the school’s small gymnasium. The boys sit in chairs in rows on one side of the gym, the girls on the other. One by one, the “auctioneer” holds up a box lunch, and the boys make their bids. Boxes prettier than mine are sold to the highest bidder, many of them boys who I liked. Finally, my heart-covered box came up for auction. Bernie Buske raised his hand. He bid low. No other boy bid against him. He won the chance for us to sit together and share my carefully crafted box lunch. Do I have to say how much I detested skinny, pale-faced, wormy-looking, wimpy-acting Bernie Buske at an age when the only attribute that matters is what a boy looks like? I was humiliated. Bernie, who’d had a crush on me since 1st grade, smiled from ear to ear. My girlfriends giggled. Sharing a Valentine’s Day box lunch with Bernie was a blow to whatever self-esteem I may have had at the time.
I’ve never forgotten how I felt that night. And now, after a day when I wrote 1343 words, Nettie Rabbit feels exactly the same way.
(PS. Of course, in my old age, I wonder: What were those 4-H leaders thinking, setting up ten- and eleven-year-old kids this way???)
Nineteen days down, eleven to go.
#NaNoWriMo18