I saw this:
I walked through here:
Noted the random kaledeiscope in my hotel room:
And on my last night in the city, after hanging out with David Levithan (yeah) and Lucy Christopher (author of STOLEN), Jessi Kirby (author of MOONGLASS) and John Corey Whaley (author of WHERE THINGS COME BACK) and I were too hyper to go to sleep, so we went in search of vegetarian food at 1AM in the morning in New Orleans (laugh it up) and ended up eating french fries in this massive casino:
Which had Lord of the Rings gambling games that did not come out in the picture :( And then I found myself back in the airport, where I saw this dress:
Which is interesting because you could never actually get INTO the airport wearing a rusty nail dress (that's what the sign calls it, no lie), and yet there it was, right by the gate.
And in the airport, before I got home, I also the books of people I know, which is still mind-blowing, and I don't think it ever won't be:
But even with all of this amazingness, even after meeting and talking to librarians and readers and my fellow writers and amazing book bloggers, even after hearing Paolo Bacigalupi, A.S. King, Lucy Christopher and other wildly talented and intelligent authors speak at the Printz reception, I think my favorite part of my trip was the Newbery/Caldecott banquet, unfortunate lasagna aside. Erin Stead, illustrator of A SICK DAY FOR AMOS MCGEE, Clare Vanderpool, author of MOON OVER MANIFEST, and author and illustrator Tomie dePaola all spoke and moved me to tears, though I totally pretended there was something in my eye. They talked about the enduring beauty of paper books and the human need to tell stories, but of everything I heard, there was one thing in particular that I'm still thinking about.
Tomie dePaola, the author and illustrator of dozens (hundreds, possibly) of children's books, who won the Caldecott Honor in 1979 for Strega Nona, won the Laura Ingalls Wilder Award on Sunday and gave a hilarious and heartwarming speech, the final one for the night. He ended it with,
"You gave me eternity."
And I haven't been able to stop thinking about that since.
When I was little, my mother used to read me books. Often the same ones, over and over again, not because we didn't have hundreds but because I was so in love with some stories that I never wanted to let them go. One of those books that I loved so, so much was Strega Nona. It was a story about a magical old lady with an enchanted pasta pot so that she could always have pasta when it was needed; but one day, a character named Big Anthony discovered it, said the wrong magic words, and the town overflowed with pasta. Strega Nona fixed it in the end, of course, Big Anthony learned his lesson, and all was well.
Two decades and some change ago, I would listen to that story and grin, exposing all of my baby teeth, when all of the villagers lined up in front of Big Anthony for their pasta, and laugh when when Strega Nona made him eat it. Back then, Duck Hunt didn't exist yet, neither did cell phones, every car was fitted with a tape deck for cassettes, and I would watch Disney videos on VHS. Now I listen to MP3s, my cell phone (an iPhone) is practically a mini computer, and the original Mario game has been re-released for the Wii.
But even with everything that's changed, even after living through Regan and the first Bush and Bill Clinton and the second Bush and now Obama, even after living in four states and eight cities, even after kindergarten, and elementary school and high school and college and law school, when asked about one of my favorite children's book characters? I still think of Strega Nona and her magical pasta pot. I think of her unforgettable silhouette and I grin.
And so I sat at that banquet table Sunday night, listening to the man who created a character that became a part of me, and I listened to him thank the librarians for giving him eternity. And he is right. He does have eternity. Because the best characters are the ones we can't forget. The ones we don't want to let go of, even when we know how the story ends. The ones we want to be friends with and the ones we wish were real and the ones we love to hate. Madeline, Matilda, and Viola Swamp, Harry Potter, Holden Caulfield and Dexter Morgan, Humbert Humbert and Hannibal Lecter and yes, Edward Cullen.
Are we what we read? We can be. If the right story hits us at the right time, if it speaks to us, if the characters are people we just can't forget, it doesn't matter whether that story is TWILIGHT or THE CATCHER IN THE RYE. The best books are the ones I keep thinking about long after I've turned the last page, the ones I want to reread because I don't want to let the characters go. Not every book will get there. In fact, relatively few will.
But Strega Nona did, and so, more than three decades after Tomie dePaola published that story, I rode in an elevator with him and said "goodnight" as he departed for his hotel room, too shy to tell him that I still have that same edition of Strega Nona and that I will make sure my child has it someday, too. But I will never forget Sunday night, being an author in that banquet hall with the launch of my debut novel three months away, listening to other authors who will have eternity because of the characters that they have created. And hoping against hope that with this chance I've been given, maybe someday, someone, somewhere, will love one of my characters enough to give it to me, too.
What characters live on in you?
