Podcast Producer/Host (31:08)
The figs is one of my favorite episodes, and I think it's one that I don't usually hear from kids as their favorite, though every once in a while, a kid says the figs is their favorite, and it's kind of makes me smile a little bit inside. I think it doesn't feel exactly like a typical fairy tale, in part because it's not about one of the more common emotions that kids have, like feeling jealous of a sibling or feeling mistreated by a parent or by grownups or needing to do something brave and difficult, though that exists in the story too. The emotion at the heart of the figs is missing a place that you've left behind, which is a feeling that some kids can identify with. And as you get older, you know, if you go off to college or if you move, you might be more likely to have experienced this emotion. But because it's not the most common fairy tale emotion, this story, to me, feels kind of rare and special and beautiful. One of the first moments in this episode that sort of let me see that it was gonna be a special one was when the kids describe what a is. I find it kind of hard to describe a fig. And the kids did it so beautifully. And maybe my favorite thing about it, actually, is that you can hear if you listen closely in my voice, how surprised and delighted I am by the way the kids describe what a fig is. I'm often delighted by what kids say on the podcast, obviously, because I put it on the podcast. But you can't always hear it in my voice because I've got so many things going on. I'm trying to focus on the next thing that happens in the story. I'm trying to make sure that everybody in the classroom that I'm recording in is focused and paying attention and ready for the next moment. I'm also making sure that we get good sound for the recording so that when you listen to it, it sounds good, too. So I got a lot of things that I'm thinking about as I'm telling a story. And that means sometimes when a kid says something amazing, I kind of just say interesting or. Yeah, and then I keep moving. But this one, for some reason, the way this kid described the. Like, the dryness or whatever they said on the outside of the fig and the wetness on the inside just kind of stopped me for a minute. And you can hear in my voice how moved I was by this simple, poetic little description of a fig. Another thing I love about this story is a small change that I made to it that really changed what it was about. And I kind of referenced this at the beginning. So the original Franz Ksava von Schonvoort story says there was once a king who loved figs more than any other food, which is also just a great and surprising beginning of a fairy tale that's unlike any fairy tale I've ever read before. But it doesn't give an explanation of why he did. And so I added in this element of having the rich man instead of a king, being from a different country and missing this taste, and also the poor woman being from that same country. And the reason I did that is because what inspired me to do that was my wife's grandfather came to this country from Sicily, which is the big island at the bottom of Italy, and he brought with him a cutting of figs and planted a fig cutting in his yard and a fig tree grew up in front of their house. And if you drive through Brooklyn, which is where I. I live and where he moved, you can see a lot of houses with fig trees in front of their yards where immigrants from Italy came and moved and planted their fig trees. Speaking of these immigrants from Italy who came to Brooklyn, I really love that conversation about the reasons people have to leave their homeland. As you may or may not be aware, that's a big question today in the United States. Should we have immigrants? Should we have more immigrants, fewer immigrants? And I think a part of the question that we often forget about, we often think of it from our perspective. Do we want more immigrants in the United States or not? But I think we often forget to talk about why they might be coming to the United States and why they might be leaving. And I thought these kids were so thoughtful about that question. I wish grownups were as thoughtful as these kids. And speaking of being thoughtful, this conversation about how the first son treats the girl, and one of the kids on the podcast says it's like he's treating her like. Like she's a pencil, which I just thought was so great, because grownups spend a lot of time talking about objectifying other people. Frequently it's in terms of, like, men objectifying women, which means thinking about women as something to look at or as somebody to just do something useful for them and not thinking of them as people. They think of them as objects. So thinking of people objectifying people is a big fancy word. But this kid stumbled on that same concept all themselves by saying he thinks of her like a pencil, meaning, like, something just to use. One of the things that I love about talking to kids is, you know, adults, we have these big fancy concepts like objectifying, and we may not really think about what they mean. We may not really understand them. Kids may not have the concept, but they understand and observe the world so freshly and accurately. Also, because you say things like, I.
