"I'm Not a Little Kid Anymore:" What Does it Mean to be Grown Up?

Review by Terry Northcutt, Ph.D.

Mongoose in The Library Card
Jerry Spinelli
Publisher: Scholastic Paperbacks, Reprint Edition, 1998
Format: Four Short Stories, Mongoose: Pp. 3-52, Book: 176 Pages

Social Emotion Learning Categories: 
 
The Library Card by Jerry Spinelli, winner of the American Library Association’s Newbery Medal for his novel Maniac Magee, captures the moment when a teenager recognizes that he is something new, something he has never been before, something closer to adult than child. Bobbie Morgan and Jamie Hill have this epiphany on their twelfth birthdays:
 
“People were smaller or seemed so anyway. Their teacher, their parents, older kids, grown-ups—suddenly they were not the danger they used to be. And neither were their weapons: detentions, groundings, scoldings, rules, threats. Nothing and no one was as big or as fearsome as before.”
 
Exhilarated by the knowledge that they knew more and could do more than when they were little kids, the boys shoplifted candy, sold it to younger kids, then used the money to buy spray paint to announce their new selves and their new names, Weasel and Mongoose, to the larger world on sidewalks and street signs, rooftops and chimneys, walls and doors.
 
Bobby Weasel Morgan decides to exercise his new powers not only by shoplifting, but also through defiance toward teachers. His future plans include dropping out of school on his sixteenth birthday and owning a red firebird with mag wheels. Of course, he has no particular plan about how he will come to own the firebird or what he will do after he leaves school, but these are his dreams for his new and expanding sense of himself.
 
Jamie Mongoose Hill initially follows Weasel’s lead, but as the result of a mysterious library card that appears amid his shoplifted candy, he chooses a different route.  In December, while spraying a tree with his new name, Mongoose discovers a bug three times the size of his thumbnail, the biggest bug he has ever seen at a time of year when no bug should be crawling anywhere.

His curiosity about this bug leads him to consider the library card and then to a mysterious library where a librarian hands him a book entitled, I Wonder. Jamie discovers the bug was really the shell of a cicada and that there is a fish that climbs trees, a bird that fights its enemies by vomiting on them, and an insect that can walk around for two weeks with its head cut off.  Spinelli’s depiction of Mongoose reading this book eloquently conveys the depth and breadth of words such as “passion” and “wonder” and “awe”:
 
“He had tried numerous times to read [the book] straight through, but he just couldn’t do it. He kept skipping ahead, skipping back, jumping all over the place. Same problem he had with a banana split. Each of its many parts was so tempting, he barely nibbled at one before being lured away by another. Different though, because when he finished a split, he was stuffed, felt like he’d never eat again. With this book, he could wolf it down at breakfast and be ready for more before lunchtime…Another difference: banana splits made Mongoose greedy. No grizzly bear ever guarded her cubs more ferociously than Jamie Mongoose Hill guarded a split. But with this book, appetite seemed to move in more than one direction. His hunger was to feed not only himself but someone else, to both take and give, to share. Which is what he did all week to his mother and father and older brother—till they were stuffed. But Weasel, he wasn’t biting.”
 
Mongoose is not just accumulating amazing facts to impress or gross out his peers. He is not experiencing the surprise of seeing the newest technological gadget which like the phone or computer initially astounds, but soon becomes familiar and just an extension of ordinary life. He is encountering the world beyond school and family as something mysterious and incomprehensible. Something that propels him deeper and deeper as he tries to fathom the world’s myriad possibilities. Something that connects him deeper and more meaningfully with himself, his family, his teacher, the world. Something more sustaining than wonder as surprise, astonishment, and amazement   something perhaps equivalent to awe, and, therefore, more apt to sustain him through the late teen years and adulthood.
 
Spinelli realistically portrays Weasel’s confusion, anger, hurt and sadness as Jamie decides to take a different path.

Discussion Questions
 
For children and adolescents the story of Weasel and Mongoose provides a springboard for discussing their own evolution into something new and something they have never been before. After reading the story of Mongoose and Weasel, children might discuss the following questions: 
 
What does it mean not to be “little kids” anymore?

How can they celebrate their new abilities and powers?

Have they ever encountered an activity that engulfs and extends them the way the information about insects does for Jamie? If they haven’t, how would they go about finding their hobbies, their interests, their passions?

Why do they think some kids choose to use their new knowledge, power and abilities like Weasel and others like Jamie?

Have they had friends from preschool who didn’t take destructive paths but whose interests just became so different they seldom had time for each other?


 

 

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