Timeless good things: Old trucks and cooking together
Timeless good things: Old trucks and cooking together
Dana Gaskin Wenig on 'The Old Truck' and 'Our Little Kitchen,' our Sustaining Books for July
Each month, writer and children’s book expert Dana Gaskin Wenig chooses an enduring children’s book or new classic to explore in depth. This month, she unpacks the allure of old trucks, the magic of community, and the power of great illustrations in two recent children's picture books.
The Old Truck
I come by my love of old trucks honestly.
I remember standing in the bed of an old truck, feet placed wide to stay steady, wind blowing my hair back, fingertips gripping the thin rim of curved metal around the back side of the cab as we bumped and rumbled up and down the dirt roads of my childhood in Tennessee and British Columbia.
I felt free in those moments, certainly free of safety precautions, but that was a different time.
I love most old things. I believe they hold something of the spirit of a place or the people who have loved them. Certainly, a new truck gets better mileage and is likely more comfortable, but an old truck … it has character.
The beloved children's book author Byrd Baylor once wrote, in an essay called "Good Women Who Love Bad Trucks," that her favorite "was a red, 1940-something Ford which was so beautiful that I overlooked the fact that it did not have a motor.” She later painted the truck blue, and “It sat in my driveway in Tucson for three years, motionless. I thought of it as urban sculpture and even washed it now and then … ”
Maybe a love of old trucks is just part of the American character. The Pumphrey Brothers, Jarrett …
… and Jerome …
… the duo who wrote and illustrated The Old Truck (2020) have tapped into that love in a gorgeous, illustrated book that will make truck lovers of all who read it.
In the same way that reading aloud to kids introduces them to ideas and different worlds and lives, good illustrations do the same, while at the same time introducing children to art. I’m much more interested in reading aloud to a child if I like the illustrations, if the art, as well as the story, is something we can talk about. And quality illustrations make us feel and remember!
To create the iconic, retro look of the book, Jerome and Jarrett crafted over 250 individual stamps and selected a palette that is almost-pastel, the color of things faded in the sun. But don’t think for a moment that this technique is spare. It’s lush. Each page is well balanced, with meaningful illustrations and short sentences on each spread, neither words nor art taking over the story.
The Old Truck is about a little girl with loads of determination, and it's about a family working together. The story is about the old truck; the story is about more than the old truck. It's about a small farm, It's about the passing of time. And it's about generation after generation of a Black American family working the same piece of land, a story that is seldom told.
But what a joyous story it is in the Pumphrey brothers' telling. A subtle, beautiful testament to grit and mothers and the transfer of generational bounty. Indeed, as the back flap explains: “Our mom raised four sons while running the family business. Our grandmothers exuded grit and determination. Our great-grandmother bought her own farm in Louisiana with the money she earned picking cotton.”
In the first two-page spread of The Old Truck, mother and father are loading the old truck with bushels of tomatoes and carrots and greens while the little girl watches from the barn. In the last two-page spread, that little girl, a mother now, is loading the truck with bushels of potatoes and greens and tomatoes while her daughter sits on the tailgate.
In my imagination, this bounty is headed for Our Little Kitchen, (2020) another gorgeous, illustrated book, this one by Jillian Tamaki.
Our Little Kitchen
The book opens with possibility: a woman and child walk into a blank page.
The following page shows them greeting people already engaged in menu planning, because this is the story of people coming together to feed their community.
The energy in the illustrations works beautifully here — the child reaching toward people already working together, people who obviously all know and enjoy each other. Over the next few pages, individuals representing the beautiful variety of humanity, young and old, decorated and dressed as they please, arrive carrying bags of food and exuding energy for the tasks at hand. They don aprons, roll up sleeves, and start carrying pots around.
Though it’s clear that everyone in Our Little Kitchen is engaged in decision making, the person wearing the pink Sharpie on her green apron says to the assembled crew, “Let’s look around and see what we’ve got, what we’ve grown, what we’ve kept, been given, and bought!” This invitation to see the bounty around us and make creative choices about what to cook for each other is one of the things I love most about this book.
In the following pages, people pick fresh vegetables, rummage through the refrigerator, and banter about food gone bad. Each page contains fun and funny detail, and the illustrations show movement and scent, action and play.
It reminds me of cooking with large groups of family and friends when I was a kid, the dance of a lot of people sharing a small space, the good will required when working together to prepare a large meal in a short period of time.
I can imagine that onion sting in my eye, hear the “Chop, chop, chop,” of the zucchini, the “sprinkle” of cinnamon into the apple crumble. This is a perfect book to read aloud to any child because it offers so many opportunities to talk about the sights and sounds, the texture and movement, the intent and the activity. This book invites us to think about how we collaborate with our kids and our community. It’s a generous book on every level.
Even things like food gone bad, beans again, complaints, and the impossibility of perfection have a place here, and are dealt with in humorous fashion. The time aspect is also fun, the countdown to presenting dinner to the neighborhood would not be complete without last minute jitters and someone keeping the group on task. The proud crew approaches the waiting table, the assembled neighbors, one with an accordion, another feeling shy. They wait patiently, clearly excited about what’s coming, and then, a lovingly prepared meal: community.
It’s perfect for children who are curious about making food, who like working with caregivers in the kitchen, who like to share (though it’s not a moralistic story), and about the joy of sharing work. Reading it together shows how work can be play, and how sharing food is more than sharing food, it’s communion. I also love how the youngest member of the cooking crew rallies everyone for cleanup. It can sometimes feel like a lot to be the cleanup crew after being the cooking crew, but this group comes together and leaves their small kitchen gleaming for the next day, the next cooks, the next week.
Our Little Kitchen won the Eisner Award in 2021 for Best Publication for Early Readers. Jillian Tamaki was born in Ottawa, Ontario, to an Egyptian-American mother and a Japanese-Canadian father. She grew up in Calgary, Alberta. This is Tamaki’s third picture book, and it has the richness of illustration seen in graphic novels, which makes sense because her first seven books are graphic novels. Even the endpapers offer beautiful, step-by-step, easy to follow recipes from the story.
Jillian Tamaki …
… was a volunteer at “a small community kitchen.” In her Author’s Note she adds, “When things are stretched thin, food is often the first thing to be cut. As passionate and tenacious as we were, our little kitchen was not a solution to our problems of food, housing, and economic insecurity — it merely provided one meal on Wednesday nights. … We are often told that a single person can change the world," Tamaki says. "Just think about what many of us can accomplish — with our bodies, voices, votes, and hearts — together.”
There are community kitchens all over the world, and there have been for as long as there have been hungry people. Some community kitchens involve neighbors who come together once a week to cook for the neighborhood like in this book. Others are kitchens that grow out a particular time to meet a specific time of need (many grew up in 2020 to feed people struggling because of the pandemic), still others are created as part of intentional communities.
Community kitchens are one example of the ways in which we have engaged in mutual aid since the beginning of time and will continue to do so. It’s easy to think of food preparation solely as a practical issue, but my experience growing up in two different intentional communities taught me that it is more than that.
I learned that cooking with people is community, and that feeding people is love, is responsibility, is respect. Growing food and cooking for and feeding people is who we are when we are at our best.
It’s how we show up for each other.
A note from Dana
Since I left retail at the beginning of the pandemic, I have come to rely on my independent bookseller friends to recommend the best new books. Many thanks to my bookseller friends Christina and Theo and Rosa at Third Place Books for their help.
The name and concept for Third Place Books is based on Ray Oldenberg’s book, The Great Good Place. As the bookstore’s website explains, “Each of us needs three places: first is the home; second is the workplace or school; and beyond lies the place where people from all walks of life interact, experiencing and celebrating their commonality as well as their diversity.”
Working there for four years was my dream job. Sharing great books, either by taking people to the shelves or writing reviews, is right up there with riding in an old truck or cooking for people, in my book.
Dana Gaskin Wenig is a writer, writing teacher, and former bookseller. She lives in the Seattle area.
320 Sycamore Studios is a children’s book publisher. Visit our Bookshelf page to read our stories for free. Books are also available for purchase on Amazon.
Image sources: Truck photo: Cayton Heath on Unsplash; Pumphrey brothers photos and The Old Truck book illustrations: https://thepumphreybrothers.com; Our Little Kitchen illustrations: https://www.jilliantamaki.com.