From: Barbara Tobin <barbarat>
Date: Tue, 08 Jul 2003 18:38:52 +0800

I do not have any elegant words of wisdom regarding the book/movie, but thought I would share a small, personal vignette. I saw the movie with my nine-year-old godson, who is an avid reader, including Holes and all the Harry Potters, and who is also a very restless ADHD kid. We took his five-year-old autistic brother, due to the lack of a babysitter, thinking it was not really suitable for him. Much to my surprise, they both sat spellbound throughout the movie.

After the movie, we went back to their place, and just coincidentally had a poignant little ceremony in their beautiful backyard to bury my bunny?s ashes in their family plot (don?t? laugh?this was very serious and quite lovely). All four of us (including their mum) dug out a shovel full of dirt, sprinkled in the miniscule amount of ashes, then shoveled back our load of dirt. We older ones used a regular shovel, whereas the young fella used a small plastic shovel. The irony of our activity having come straight from the movie was not lost on us, and we had a bit of a giggle over our hands-on approach to responding to the story.

I think now that whenever there is any digging going on, I am hereafter going to think of Stanley and the guys out there at Camp Green Lake. (I dare not share this week?s vignette of digging for my lost sister-in-law?s ashes in the backyard rose garden, but I did think again of Stanley and Zero as our shovels kept striking what turned out to be builders? rubble). It's sobering to think how pervasively our lives can be affected by literature, in quite unexpected ways.

Barbara Tobin (barbarat at gse.upenn.edu)
Received on Tue 08 Jul 2003 05:38:52 AM CDT