When I was a child, one of my favorite books was The Phantom Tollbooth.
The Phantom Tollbooth (1961, Alfred A. Knopf) is a children's book and a modern fairy tale full of wordplay. Written by Norton Juster and illustrated by Jules Feiffer, it tells the story of a bored young boy named Milo who drives through a magic tollbooth into the Kingdom of Wisdom, where he chooses to visit one of the divided country's two capitals, Dictionopolis. En route he gets lost in the Doldrums, but is found and rescued by the steadfast (and literal) watchdog Tock, who joins him on his journey.
I don't know about the rest of you Minnesota stay at home moms, but I could use Tock right about now.
Unrelenting cold. Unrelenting illness on the part of my child. My mind has dulled. My senses have dulled. My mind has dulled. I find myself repeating myself, repeating myself.
Sigh.
Now don't get me wrong, my life rocks. I LOVE LOVE LOVE my husband. My little guy is making me laugh every other minute. My big kids threw me a surprise party and thought of everything, right down to the homemade gifts. I mean they got it perfect.
But Tock, where are you? The doldrums are H-E-R-E.
Help!
I loved that book.
I'm gonna find that book tomorrow and reread it.
Yep, that is my plan.
While numbed beyond reason, I did surf a bit and found this awesome video.
Check it out!
Here is an exerpt from PT to take us out. Over and out.
"Well, if you can't laugh or think, what can you do?" asked Milo.
"Anything as long as it's nothing, and everything as long as it isn't anything," explained another. "There's lots to do; we have a very busy schedule-
"At 8 o'clock we get up, and then we spend
"From 8 to 9 daydreaming.
"From 9 to 9:30 we take our early midmorning nap.
"From 9:30 to 10:30 we dawdle and delay.
"From 10:30 to 11:30 we take our late early morning nap.
"From ll:00 to 12:00 we bide our time and then eat lunch.
"From l:00 to 2:00 we linger and loiter.
"From 2:00 to 2:30 we take our early afternoon nap.
"From 2:30 to 3:30 we put off for tomorrow what we could have done today.
"From 3:30 to 4:00 we take our early late afternoon nap.
"From 4:00 to 5:00 we loaf and lounge until dinner.
"From 6:00 to 7:00 we dillydally.
"From 7:00 to 8:00 we take our early evening nap, and then for an hour before we go to bed at 9:00 we waste time.
"As you can see, that leaves almost no time for brooding, lagging, plodding, or procrastinating, and if we stopped to think or laugh, we'd never get nothing done."
"You mean you'd never get anything done," corrected Milo.
"We don't want to get anything done," snapped another angrily; "we want to get nothing done, and we can do that without your help."
"You see," continued another in a more conciliatory tone, "it's really quite strenuous doing nothing all day, so once a week we take a holiday and go nowhere, which was just where we were going when you came along. Would you care to join us?"
"I might as well," thought Milo; "that's where I seem to be going anyway."
End schmend, I found more good stuff. Here is an exerpt from a Salon interview with Norton Juster in 2001, 40 years after the book came out.
You had no idea when you started this book how it would turn out?
I had no idea. One of the first things I wrote was that scene where the Mathemagician, the ruler of Digitopolis, explains infinity to Milo. I'd had a conversation with a child who said to me, "What's the biggest number there is?" One of those wonderful children's questions you never know how to answer. I asked him a question: What do you think the biggest number is? He gave me one of these 80 skillion, 159 trillion numbers that went on and on, and so I said, "OK, add one to it." He thought that was enormously funny. I realized that we were talking about infinity as only two total mathematical illiterates could and having an absolutely wonderful time.
I started with that scene, because I loved it. I wrote the book from all different angles. It wasn't completely sequential, but just little bits and pieces. One thing that was extraordinarily useful to me was when I had a character or an idea for a scene, I'd write a lot of conversations between the characters, which was my way of getting to know how they sounded and what they might say. After you do this, and you're writing the scene, you sometimes get the feeling that you're sitting back and simply recording or eavesdropping on what the characters are saying. They're making the conversation and you're just there as a scribe. That's a wonderful feeling.
This quote reminded me of my husband. He is writing a book right now. Well, right now he is driving to work, but sometime tonight, I'm sure he'll be working on his book. He's been working on it since December, and he's getting very serious about it. I love that.
Its been on his list of dreams to write a novel since before I met him. And now he's doing it. He's talking about how the story is taking him away now, how the characters are developing to the point where they are doing things unexpectedly as he writes. Goosebumps!
And as a final footnote, I know there are at least two fine women out there who will read this and think, "Whiny $&%^%! How can she complain about her life which is truly wonderful when there are people in the world who are really facing hard times."
And to them I say, "You are right. How can I?" And yet in all honesty I am. Its the old wheelchair argument. When someone is going through their version of a hard time it isn't uplifting to them to point out that woman in a wheelchair is worse off. I know I don't have it bad. I know people I love are suffering more. Still. The doldrums. I honor you for keeping your heads up so well in the face of true adversity. I'm back here struggling with tedium, and I am a bit ashamed. Hope you have grace for me.
