I am sixty-two years old and I have spent most of the last year drawing a face on a box.
Not a metaphorical box. A shipping container. Forty feet of corrugated steel, navy blue, with eyes above the door latches and a mouth that opens when the cargo doors do. His name is Chuck. I have strong opinions about his eyebrows, and I have defended them out loud, to another adult.
This was not the plan.
I have spent thirty-nine years in marketing. I have also spent twenty-some of those years teaching children which fork to use and how to shake a hand without apologizing for existing. People find that charming right up until they realize I am completely serious about it.
So the box surprised everybody. Me included.
I left this industry in 2000, the year my son was born, and came back twenty-five years later to write books for six-year-olds. I said for a while that I had not examined that too closely. I have examined it a little.
My son is grown. He is doing beautifully and I could not be prouder, and he does not need me to explain anything to him anymore. Which is the entire point of the exercise.
It is also how you end up a superhero with nobody left to save. Nobody warns you about that part. You spend twenty years explaining the world to one person, they go off and understand it perfectly well without you, and you are left standing in the kitchen holding a cape.
So I went looking for more people to explain things to. There turns out to be about seventy million of them in this country and they are all under twelve.
Here is how the box came into it. I asked a child where something came from. Her shoes, I think. She said, “the store.” Which is true, in the way that “my mother” is a true answer to where do babies come from. So I asked how it got to the store. She gave me a look I have since seen on the faces of several grown adults, two of whom work in freight.
Now. Those shoes crossed an ocean inside a steel box. A crane the size of an office building picked that box off a ship without dropping it. Someone at a border read every line of the paperwork and decided it was true. Someone drove them to a warehouse. Someone else drove them to a store. Dozens of people who will never meet each other, and not one of them got it wrong.
That is not a boring story. We simply never tell it to anyone under forty.
And it costs us. Our industry complains constantly that it cannot find people, and then starts looking when they are twenty-two — by which point they have chosen from a list we were never on. I cannot fix hiring. I can draw a box.
Here is the thing I like best about Chuck, and I am aware of how this sounds. He is covered in dents. Every scuff on him came from somewhere real, and he can tell you which port left which mark. They are his passport stamps. I drew a scratched, faded, slightly battered box on purpose, because a child should meet something that has been places and is proud of the wear.
So I did that, and then I gave him a friend who checks everything three times and is kind about it, and then thirteen more, and then it was eleven o'clock on a Tuesday and I was arguing with myself about whether a gantry crane would be a girl.
People have pointed out that this is a great deal of effort for a hobby. It is. But if you are going to spend every weekend explaining something, it had better be entertaining and it had better have a point, or it is just journaling with better pens.
And here is what I did not expect. The adults read them.
This industry is invisible on purpose. It works best when nobody notices, which is also why nobody understands it when it stops working. Stuff simply arrives, and we never ask how. It turns out the six-year-old version of the answer is about the right length for all of us.
Everything I make is free. Free to families, free to schools, free to libraries, and it stays that way for as long as I am the one deciding. My husband, who is a patient man, asked what the business model is for giving things away. It is a fair question and I do have a real answer, but the honest first answer is this: a child should not need a parent with a credit card to find out how the world works.
Thirty-nine years in marketing, twenty of them teaching manners, and if I have learned one thing it is that everything good starts at a table with somebody who bothered to explain it.
So that is what this is. A dented steel box with eyebrows, explaining the world to a six-year-old, for free.
The cape still fits.
Robin