What the Children’s Shelf Knows

I recently finished reading The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store by James McBride. It’s a fascinating novel set in a small Pennsylvania town in 1936. The major theme seems to be about the difficulties that minorities have with becoming integral parts of American society. The book focuses on the struggles of Jews and Blacks. This is a story that resonates in our present age. We have always been a country that tries to balance unity and diversity, often with unsatisfactory results.

The book makes me think about the city in which I have lived since 1988. I reside in Oak Creek, Wisconsin, a community that is semi-rural but getting less rural every day. When my family first moved here, the population was overwhelmingly white, mostly people of German or Polish descent. Now it’s very different. The demographics have radically changed.

I take my grandson, Asher, to the Oak Creek Library quite often. We go to the children’s section. He plays with the toys there and sometimes I read a book to him. The library has a prominent display of holiday books for kids. There are several shelves filled with stories about different holidays that come up during the course of the year. In total, there are probably over one hundred available for children or their parents to read.

The library has had a display like this for as long as I can remember, but as the years have gone by, the types of books have changed. Years ago, the holiday books only referred to traditional festivals, like Thanksgiving, Christmas, Easter, St. Patrick’s Day, Valentine’s Day, and Halloween. Now, there are books about Passover and Hanukkah, Ramadan and Eid, the Lunar New Year, Diwali, and Juneteenth Day. The number of holidays that are included on the shelves has exploded.

It would be tempting to think that perhaps some cabal of woke librarians decided to include all of these more exotic holidays among the books displayed. I suspect that is not the case. The reason for that is that as each one of these holidays approaches on the calendar, the section of the shelves that houses the books for that event empties out. This implies that people are checking out the books on that particular holiday and reading them. There is a market for these stories among the local population. This further implies that the city is a place of diversity.

I can see that reality whenever I take Asher to the library or to a local playground. He plays with children from all sorts of ethnic and racial backgrounds. A city and a country that are culturally diverse is Asher’s present situation, and it is his future.

You can see it in something as simple as library shelves that empty as holidays approach. Diversity is already part of daily life here. The work ahead is to accept that fact and keep building a workable unity in the public spaces we share.

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Frank (Francis) Pauc is a graduate of West Point, Class of 1980. He completed the Military Intelligence Basic Course at Fort Huachuca and then went to Flight School at Fort Rucker. Frank was stationed with the 3rd Armor Division in West Germany at Fliegerhorst Airfield from December 1981 to January 1985. He flew Hueys and Black Hawks and was next assigned to the 7th Infantry Division at Fort Ord, CA. He got the hell out of the Army in August 1986.

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