Tomie DePaola wins the Wilder Award

The American Library Association made this announcement at its Midwinter Meeting in San Diego. The Wilder Award, as the article says, is given to a children's author for outstanding lifetime achievement, and was first awarded to its namesake, Laura Ingalls Wilder, in 1954.

In my Materials for Children course last summer, I was required to read and review the book of a Wilder Award winner. I chose Laurence Yep, the 2005 winner and author of the Golden Mountain Chronicles, a series of books about a Chinese family immigrating to San Francisco in the late nineteenth century. I had never heard of Yep prior to this class, but I enjoyed Dragon Road, about a Chinese-American basketball team travelling across the country in the 1930s, so much that I picked up The Earth Dragon Awakes, about the San Francisco Earthquake of 1903, to read after the course ended.

Tomie DePaola, on the other hand, is an author with whom I was a bit more familiar. I read his books as a child and I've read his books to my own children. My favorite book of his, however, was not even listed in any of the articles I read: Nana Upstairs and Nana Downstairs. It is a book for children on dealing with the death of a grandparent or a great-grandparent, and has been recommended on bibliotherapy lists. Wikipedia labels the book autobiographical, and the first pages of the book state that DePaola is giving memories of his own grandmother and great-grandmother.

My great-grandmother passed away shortly after my fifth birthday. My memories of her include a vague picture of what her house looked like, and her muffins. Her son, my grandfather, passed away last March, just prior to my son's fifth birthday. Last winter, when my grandfather's cancer became aggressive again and I knew he didn't have much time left, I checked out Nana Upstairs and Nana Downstairs and read it for the first time in over 30 years. It is the story of young Tommy visiting his grandparents, Nana Downstairs and Grandfather Tom, and his great-grandmother, Nana Upstairs, called such because she was in her nineties and bedridden "upstairs." They ate ice cream, Grandfather Tom took movies of them, they brushed Nana Upstairs' long hair and braided it. And then...

One morning when Tommy woke up at his own house, his mother came to talk to him.
"Nana Upstairs died last night," she said.
"What's 'died'?" Tommy asked.
"'Died' means that Nana Upstairs won't be here anymore," Mother answered.

The best part of the book was a page or two later when Tommy saw a shooting star and woke up his mother, who told him that Nana Upstairs was sending him a kiss.

The book ends this way:

A long time later, when Tommy had grown up, Nana Downstairs was old and in bed just like Nana Upstairs. Then she died too. And one night, when he looked out his bedroom window, Tommy saw another star fall gently through the sky. Now you are both Nana Upstairs, he thought.

Thank you, Tomie DePaola. It is not only children who derive meaning from your books.