Most authors spend countless hours hunched over a computer keyboard, desperately seeking inspiration or the right combination of words.
“My Friend Noah” sprang from a series of notes carried around in a third-grader’s backpack.
“This was the way we got to know our son,” marveled Betty Schaaf, mother of the 12-year-old boy with Down syndrome whose name and personal story line are the basis of a new children’s book by fellow Bartow County resident Barbara Tarnow. “And now plenty of other people are getting to do the same thing.”
“My Friend Noah” is the entertaining, gently educational tale of two boys who happen to share an elementary school classroom. One of them, Noah, behaves and speaks unlike many other children; the other, Zac, is slightly wary of him at first. But as he gets to know Noah better, he comes to regard him as a reliably good and kind friend. And vice versa.
“I want teachers and parents to use it as a teaching tool,” said Tarnow, a special education paraprofessional at Cloverleaf Elementary School in Cartersville. “You know: ‘This child may look different, but he’s still a kid you can play with and interact with.’ ”
Or as pint-size narrator Zac puts it so memorably:
“I knew that Noah was different than my other friends, but it still seemed like he could be a cool guy.”
Not all younger children pick up on such differences, but when they do, it’s best to handle questions in a straightforward, information-based manner, said Debbie Hibben, assistant director of the Down Syndrome Association of Atlanta. The McDonough resident’s 16-year-old daughter has Down syndrome. When she was younger, Hibben would talk to Hannah’s classmates at the beginning of the school year.
“Children are generally very accepting of other children,” explained Hibben. “I would tell them about Down syndrome and that Hannah had a lot of the same interests and goals as them, she just learned some things slower. If a child asked, ‘Why does she talk like that?’ the answer is, ‘She has Down syndrome, it’s a little harder for her to say some things.’
“We explain it’s something that happens before you’re born,” Hibben continued. “And they can be good friends with everyone in the class or in a group.”
That describes the real Noah Schaaf to a T, says Tarnow. It was three years ago at Cloverleaf that she first encountered the friendly, cheerful youngster who enjoyed playing football nearly as much as dispensing hugs to people.
“Everyone in school was Noah’s best buddy,” Tarnow said with a gentle chuckle. “Everybody just couldn’t not love him.”
Yet younger children especially might not know how to respond to such an effusive greeting from another student they’ve just met. Throw in the fact that Noah speaks in “his own language” at times, Betty Schaaf says, and she worried that he might have trouble socializing. She and her husband, Paul, also wondered how they’d keep abreast of all he did at school each day.
Enter the Noah Postal Service.
“We started doing these little notes back and forth, and Noah carried them in his little backpack,” says Schaaf, whose family — including 16-year-old Kayla — lives in White. “We’d write about what he did at home and on the weekends. Barbara would tell us ‘Noah learned this word today.’ ”
One story in particular about the relationship between Noah and a younger student named Zac Woods inspired Tarnow to write. The first time they met, Noah hugged him and “Zac was not too sure. He was like, ‘Hmmm ...’ ” Tarnow recalled. “But the friendship grew between them. I started to write a note to [Noah’s] mom about how Zac and Noah were interacting and I continued to write and write. It was like ‘God, send me the words’ and it just kind of came.”
Tarnow originally wrote the story just for the Schaafs, keeping a copy for herself. Soon, though, other teachers read it and urged her to consider turning it into a book. It’s clearly struck a chord with readers as well. Tarnow has a burgeoning schedule of appearances at bookstores and festivals, frequently accompanied by Noah, who dispenses something even better than autographs to well-wishers.
“He hugs everybody,” Betty Schaaf said with a delighted laugh.
As Zac might say: A cool guy.
Meet the author
Barbara Tarnow will be at A Taste of Cartersville on Oct. 15. For more information on this and other appearances, go to the “My Friend Noah” page on Facebook.
About the Author
