Like most people, I have two grandmothers. They’re both now deceased, and I didn’t know one of them particularly well. I grew up much closer, emotionally and geographically, to my mother’s family; my father’s family grew distant after his death when I was very young, and remain so. My father’s mother, Granny, also died when I was pretty young—but she had an outsized impact on my life, through a simple fact: she had a talent for gifting books.

(In fairness, my mother’s mother, Grandma, was also good at this. She gave me a copy of The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents when I was twelve or so, and the rest is history.)

Most crucially, Granny didn’t care about age-appropriateness. There are a lot of opinions floating around about encountering books at the “right age,” about books that traumatized us, about books we needed when we were young. I try to keep abreast of these conversations, because it’s my job to know what the kids are reading and to be informed about larger trends and discourses in children’s and teen literature. God knows it drives me up a wall whenever some well-meaning adult on social media asks for recommendations for the avid (or reluctant) reader in their life, and a bunch of other well-meaning non-professionals pop up to suggest Ender’s Game and The Stand, seemingly unaware that new kids’ books are published every Tuesday. But in my personal life, I follow in Granny’s footsteps. I’ll give a kid a copy of The Once and Future King—not just The Sword in the Stone, the whole five-in-one—no problem.

That was her gift to me the year I was eleven. Granny was a huge Arthuriana nut. Maybe three years later, when I was heavy into Tamora Pierce, we visited Granny’s house in the northern wastes of Brevard County and she asked what I was reading. I went into my enthusiastic lady-knights spiel. So, said Granny, you’re in your medieval phase, that reminds me I read The Mists again last week. Caught the miniseries on TV, but it wasn’t very good.

She meant The Mists of Avalon, of course. In hindsight, the diminutive is so funny. She figured her audience knew exactly what she was talking about.

I didn’t read The Mists until I was a grand age-appropriate 16, maybe. I’m glad Granny died before horrifying information about its author appeared. But I read The Once and Future King the minute I got it home from Christmas. I didn’t understand 90% of it, but I was fascinated by it. Like Granny, T.H. White wasn’t talking down to me. I’ve read the book every year since. Every year I understand it a little more, or in a different way. It has been the major artistic influence of my life.

Sometimes I think about all the rest of the Arthuriana I discovered after Granny died, the books that are still being published today. The King’s Peace, The Winter Prince, Sword in the Stars. Stone and Table. Spear. I can’t pretend to know which she would like, but I do believe she would have read all of them, as I will be reading them until my own death.

When Granny died, the only thing I took from her house was a copy of The Book of Merlyn, the fifth book of White’s magnum opus.

*

Recently, Gary Larson started drawing again. Most crucially, he started “having fun drawing again” (his words, emphasis mine).

Gary Larson is the OG weirdo cartoonist in my mind, the gonzo uncle beside Bill Watterson’s exhausted but affectionate dad. And while I didn’t discover the limitless joys of Calvin and Hobbes until about five years ago (I know, I know), Gary Larson entered my life early on, through Granny. Bless her soul, she gave me a copy of There’s a Hair In My Dirt at… maybe age seven? There’s a Hair In My Dirt remains one of the funniest things I’ve ever read, and of course as a voracious child reader, I read it immediately, often, and quoted from it at length.

Like my early foray into White, I didn’t understand it. But it was a picture book, and thus for children. At least, that’s my assumption of my mother’s reasoning in letting me keep it.

There’s a Hair In My Dirt led me to Far Side collections at the library. In the 90s, the newspaper cartoon landscape was kind of bleak. Doonesbury was about as edgy as The Orlando Sentinel got. The Far Side was chockablock with jokes I didn’t quite get, or do not get to this day. It was a glimpse into a world of nearly pure art, where the work didn’t have to justify itself, even by such seemingly universal baselines as “making sense” and “visually appealing.” Despite being commercial (I saw Far Side strips on mugs in Books-a-Million at the mall, and so forth), Larson’s art evaded the flattening that’s usually attendant to mass appeal.

I held onto my copy of There’s a Hair In My Dirt until 2017, when Hurricane Irma moved over Tampa Bay and I was working at a county-run shelter. I brought all my old picture books to a high school in Plant City and made a free bookshelf for the mostly Spanish-speaking shelter populace. We were there for longer than anticipated, four nights, and the books were snapped up.

I hope some kid was similarly changed by Larson’s take on the circle of life.

There’s a throughline from T.H. White (an unexpected font of postmodernity) and Gary Larson (a singular but multifaceted visionary, like a fly’s eye) to things I loved later. James Hogg. The Mars Volta. Deliver.

To hear even a master like Gary Larson say that he had lost joy in drawing, and found it again, is something. In fact, it’s something all artists and writers need to hear.

*

Granny was one person, someone I wasn’t close to despite our blood relationship. Gary Larson is one person, and T.H. White is another, people I’ll never know. I’m one person.

I think one person a lot these days. My work is in public libraries, mostly with children, families, and young adults. There’s a huge number of factors working against public libraries; some of them affect every library and every citizen, and some of them are unique to my library. To be a public servant, as far as my experience goes, is to fail—by capitalist metrics—almost without cease.

Funnily enough, the same is true for writers! The source of this apparent failure is the same, too: the word has not been gotten out. There’s a bittersweetness in being told I wish I’d heard about that a day or a week or a year after an objectively failed library program. There’s some universe where that person heard in time. There’s some universe in which your story found its ideal reader.

Some days, most days, I have to force myself to think one person. One kid in front of me, using their imagination, their life experience, and their hands to tell a story that hasn’t been told before. One parent with one baby, singing with me on the story time rug. I was that one kid untold times, learning from one person—Ms. Yuhr, my childhood librarian, or Mrs. Ayers, my AP English teacher. I was that young person, changed forever by Dr. Gould and Professor Amador. I am that adult, fortunate to learn from the experts I hire at work, blessed to be moved by writers I read and workshop with.

I’m one person, spending my life being affected by one person after another. So are you.

Fannie Lou Hamer knew: three people is better than no people. Two is better than one. One is better than none.