Bolinas, CA

I've been to Bolinas once. It is a hippie dippie coastal town, north of Marin, along the coast, along Highway 1.  I lived in Sonoma for awhile with my then eight year old daughter.  Her father threatened to have me mutilated if I did not return to the Midwest so I did, cutting short my longing to live in CA.  Katie and I took many drives in the short time we lived in the area. t was all new and exciting.

We did not know about Bolinas, we happened upon it.  Once we strolled down its main street, poking our heads into shops, especially a children's book store.  I usually let my daughter pick out what she would read. I did try to keep her from reading stories like "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn" because it had a scene of a girl being raped. And when I was strongly enthusiastic about "The Bean Tress" [a few years after the Bolinas book incident I am about to describe], I tried hard because it is a great novel but definitely an adult novel.  By about the fifth grade, so, what, age 10, I had accepted that my daughter was going to read what she wanted. What was I going to do?  Censor her choices?  So. Not. Me.

When we visited the shops in Bolinas when she was 8 or maybe 9, I still made some attempts to keep some books out of her hands but hey, I had not read all the books in the world. And I tended to trust star children's book writers like Beverly Clearly.

The children's book store was packed. It would have been a weekend, for otherwise K-J would have been in school.  We had to snake our way through the store as if it was one long line. Every inch of the shop was full of people. We passed by books like robotic models on a conveyor belt. There was plenty of time to look at books because that endless, snaking line moved very very very slow.

Katie picked out a book. It it wasn't by Cleary, it was by another children's writer my daughter had happily read many times. And I repeat:  I had not read every children's book ever published.

Katie wanted a book for the ride home. Say, back then she avoided talking to me, eh? I agreed to buy her the book she selected without looking at it.

When we got to the cashier to pay for her chosen book, the cashier asked if she could speak to me on the side, away from Katie. She said "I don't think you want to buy this book for your daughter, it is too mature for her."  I tut-tutted a bit, saying my daughter was smart and the book did not look to be above her age level. I did not say, but I was thinking "My daughter is a genius and is already reading books like Austen, she can handle this kiddie novel".

The woman, however, was very upset. And adamant. She seemed ready to refuse to see us that book.

Hey, it was a book store. There were many more books. I capitulated to that woman, asking her to recommend a book. Later I looked at the book the cashier had not wanted to sell us. It in volved a child's death.

By the time Katie was ten, she had read the 500 to 600 page "Mists of Avallon" which, if memory serves, opens with a brother and sister, who don't now they are siblings but the reader does, having sex in a Beltane ritual. Once she read that, I let her read anything she chose. The Bean Trees was a book, she happily told me, she had read on the sneak years ago. And I had suspected gtaht she had because she had stopped hounding me about reading it.

Bolinas, Ca, where booksellers cling to the fantasy that it is reasonable to control what children read. Fuck it, is what I say. We're talking about books. And censorship.  Not for my kid. Not then and not ever.