The Wheel on the School, Part III

NOTE: This is a note I'll deliver to my writing students Monday.

Evert looked at the roof across the street. With enormous flappings of its huge wings, a stork, with a twig crosswise in its bill, was just then settling down on the rim of the wheel.

“See that?” Auka said.

“Sure, I see it,” Evert said testily. “But they’ll land on mine just as well, once we get it up.”

“The bright paint will keep them away,” Auka said knowingly. “What you need,” he pursued relentlessly, “is an old beat-up wheel  -- just so it’ll hold storks. Lina’s aunt’s is just an old wheel.”

“Oh, so,” Evert said. “Well, all I’ve got is a good, solid, painted wheel, and they’ll take it or leave it.”

“They’ll leave it,” Auks said promptly, “and next fall you’ll just have to haul it down again. What a work!”

“I called you over here to help me, not to give me an argument,” Evert said sourly. “And if I didn’t have to stand here arguing and holding up a heavy wheel at the same time,” I’d give you a good sound swat around the ears!”

“No, but,’ Auka said, “I mean, I know where you can get just the wheel you need, good and old, and it doesn’t have one speck of paint on it. It’s even more beat-up than Lina’s aunt’s.”

He put his shoulder under the wheel and took most of its weight, so he could carefully explain to Evert about the tin man and his hopeless wheel. “He can’t go out with it again,” Auka finished in all earnestness, “no matter how long he soaks it in the canal.”

The man looked at him oddly. “Say, you’re a funny kid, bothering your head about other people’s troubles. The tin man has always had troubles and always will with that houseful of kids. But those are his troubles, not yours nor mine.”

“No, but,” Auka persisted, “if he had your wheel, he could use his wagon, and if you had his, you’d get storks."

Auka, a young schoolboy in Meindert DeJong’s “The Wheel on the School,” has a problem. And so do two others around him.

Auka needs a wagon wheel so his schoolmates can put it up on their roof to attract storks, which the Dutch regard as lucky.

The tinsmith in the village of Nes has an old wagon on which he relies for his livelihood and for that of his wife and children, but it’s got a wobbly wheel that constantly falls off.

Evert has a brand-new wheel, painted brightly in the colors of the Dutch flag, that he hopes the storks will build a nest on. But storks won’t like the bright colors.

So Auka, seeing the problem, proposes a solution: Swapping wheels. Evert gets an old one for the storks to nest on. The tinsmith gets a new one to literally fix his wagon. Auka is still wheel-less, but he gets the satisfaction of seeing two potential friends help each other solve their problems.

I’m hoping that’s what happens in class this week, as we discuss topics for the Argumentative Synthesis Essay. We can help each other through the rough parts of getting our topics right so the wheels don’t come off our wagons later. We might be struggling with a topic -- or blind to its pitfalls -- and someone else, with different experiences, different opinions, might be able to get us pointed in the right direction. Working together, we have much more power than working alone.

The Psalmist writes in Psalms 71:12, “O God, be not far from me: O my God, make haste for my help.” Let’s be the servants of God this week and seek to help each other out.