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.
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