My mother hates Dr Seuss! and other stories

The Cat in the Hat by Dr. Seuss, 1957 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

This week my son brought home The Cat in the Hat from his school library, which is fitting because on March 2, Dr Seuss, the great children’s author and illustrator, would have been 109 years old.

He was great. Wasn’t he?

“Oh God, I hate Dr Seuss! He’s the worst!” my mother says. This jibes with my childhood memories; I had a ton of books at home growing up, but not a lot of Seuss. A few, yes: The Lorax, How the Grinch Stole Christmas!, The Cat in the Hat Comes Back (but not the first one), and that’s about it. On my mother’s list of forbidden childhood fun, Dr Seuss came in at number two, just beneath Santa Claus. Number three: Play-Doh. Number four: every other toy that was messy in any possible way. Number Five: Fun-Dip or Fun-any kind of candy. Funyuns also. No, she’s a great mom. Really.

Recently when my son took One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish out of the library I realized I had never read it before. At least as a child. After college I worked at Random House Children’s Books, which publishes the works of Seuss: the ones he wrote when he was living and the ones he wrote after he was dead. One of my tasks was tracking the sales of Seuss books. The top title, if I recall correctly, was Green Eggs and Ham.

I did not read that in my house. I did not read that with a mouse. I did not read it with my mother. She did not like it, so don’t bother!

“Why do I hate Dr Seuss?” she said, when I called to ask her. “Can’t it just be fun and simple? Why does he have to be a such a smarty-pants?”

This makes sense. If there is one thing my mother can’t abide, it’s a smarty-pants. “It’s like he’s trying to prove he’s so smart so he goes on and on and on. Sam I am Sam I am who cares? You know me, I want it short and to the point. Not impressed.”

Sam I am enough already (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

For many years my mother worked in the library at our local kindergarten center, so she has a pretty good knowledge of kids’ books. What was your policy on Dr Seuss in the library? I asked.

“Of course kids took the books out, but I didn’t promote Dr Seuss, I didn’t read Dr Seuss. I didn’t tell them not to, but I wasn’t going to read that jibber-jabber out loud. The Lorax, and all that stupid stuff? There’s nothing about it that I like.”

All righty. So, who are your favorite kids’ authors, then? How about Maurice Sendak? “Nope, didn’t like him either.” I almost hung up. I think that Where the Wild Things Are is one of the most perfectly written books, for kids or adults, ever.

“But I love Little Bear [which is illustrated by Sendak but written by Else Holmelund Minarik],” she said. “It’s so sweet and charming. And what else? God, I can’t think, I’m out of the library business. Kevin Henkes [I agree, I love everything he writes]. And Rosemary Wells [Oh that Max and Ruby!]. The Arthur books. Tomie De Paola. I don’t know, something that made you feel happy and cozy and comforted. Or something really funny. I don’t find Dr Seuss comforting or funny.”

“So can I pin this dislike for Dr Seuss on your childhood?”

She pauses. “Yeah, probably.”

My mother was born and lived, until she emigrated at five, in the south of Italy, in a poor, rural, mountain village. It was not unlike the setting of Strega Nona, the Tomie De Paola book which is a favorite of hers. Strega Nona is set in a fictional, fairy-tale Calabria, the region she was from, with its rough edges softened: Catholic and hardscrabble and peopled with goats, stubborn country folk and witches, like her mother, my own Strega Nona, without all the smiling and kiss-blowing.

It’s the kind of upbringing that looks romantic and interesting only in retrospect, from our family’s new vantage point on the U.S. east coast. But at the time, there was little room for romance in a medieval house with no heating and dirt floors. There, I would imagine, you’d seek comfort. Coziness. A simple happiness found at the edge of a desperately practical existence.

Old school. My mother’s village in Calabria.

As we were talking about Dr Seuss my aunt walked into my mother’s house. She immediately gets on the anti-Seuss bandwagon: “Oh, I never wanted to read Dr Seuss to the kids either,” she says. “Sam I am? I am Sam? Really?

“And The Cat in the Hat? In our house cleaning up was not an option.”

“Our mother never left the house, so we never got the chance to make a mess,” my mother added. “That’s for Americans with leisure time.” Oh, the zingers you’ll zing.

I will grant them their literary tastes. It’s a free country after all. You can have unusually strong opinions about whimsical children’s book authors if you want to. But I can’t let Dr Seuss go undefended on his birthday. Especially now as a parent, watching my five-year-old, newly-reading son, read Seuss books.

As fanciful as Seuss books are, it was Hop on Pop that introduced my son to reading in the most sensible way. The book repeats simple words and then switches the final letter, and encourages kids to note the differences as they are helped along by the bright, silly pictures.

Children’s books serve all sorts of purposes. The books published before Dr Seuss, were, in many cases, cozy and comforting, and those books, like Goodnight Moon, have their essential place. And there were those, too, like the work of the excellent Virginia Lee Burton (The Little House), which took on the real world is a wonderful, honest way.

On the other hand, Dr Seuss, smarty-pants extraordinaire, introduced twentieth-century children to a world beyond the comforts of hearth and home, a world that recognizes the importance of letting your imagination run amok. Yet, they are not just flights of fancy; many Seuss books have essential lessons that burst right through the silliness. Think of The Lorax, The Sneeches, the Grinch, on and on. These books were of little use for my mother and aunt whose imaginations were shaped back in the old country, where they pretty much lived in the sixteenth century.

A few minutes after we spoke, my mother called back. “Here’s another quote for your blog. Everyone says they love Dr Seuss, but do they really?” When we say we like Dr Seuss, are we all just pretending to like something that comes off a bit highbrow? Like jazz, or Champions League soccer? I asked my son when he got home from kindergarten.

“O darling child, may I ask you something? Please, finish your quinoa and locally-sourced beets first.”

“Hm?” Looks up from book of mazes.

“Do you like Dr Seuss books?”

“Yes,” he says, unreservedly.

“Why?”

“Because they’re funny.” (Take that, Mom!)

“Why else?”

“They’re cool.”

OK, I can see that this is going to be the typical cavalcade of one-word knee-jerk responses. Not the burst of enlightenment I thought my research would bring me. But suffice it to say, he likes the books. He wants to read them, or have them read to him. My two-year-old does, too. He even likes And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street. But he’s old school.

“What are else are you going to write about me?” my mother asked. “‘She didn’t bake, she didn’t play games, she didn’t do arts and crafts,’ right?” Well, she didn’t really. Those things aren’t in her bones. But listening is. And she talked to us. Candidly. And all the time. She still does.

So right now I’m going to call her back, for the fifth time today, and tell her: my grandparents schlepped all the way to America so that their descendants could sit around and enjoy piffle like Bartholomew and the Oobleck. So let’s, shall we? Oh, the places we can theoretically go!

Happy birthday to you. World Telegram & Sun photo by Al Ravenna. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

A child’s history of time

Sometimes when I drive the boys around town I take intentionally circuitous routes, thinking they won’t notice an extra five minutes tacked on to their journey. It’s an extra five minutes of peace for me, keeping them in their car seats, contained, controlled, unable to leap out and run away or start smacking each other about the head.

But lately, C has been on to me. We are taking the long way home from an after-school trip to the supermarket.

“You’re taking the long way! You’re doing it on purpose, to make me tired!” He knows a few extra minutes in the car will push him into nap territory, which is fine with me. ”We live the other way! Turn around!”

But sometimes he is in the mood to relent, to relax, to stare out the window for a while, only to be interrupted by T screaming when he sees a bus or a fire truck. Amid the yelling, C waxes philosophical:

“The first people who ever lived,” he starts, “who were their mommies and daddies? If they were the first people, whose tummy were they in?”

That’s a hard one. “It’s a mystery,” I tell him. “We can’t know for sure, because none of us were there. But scientists can look at clues they find in nature and guess.”

The back seat is quiet. There are no buses around. I can almost feel C thinking back there, trying to unravel time. Another thought:

“So, how did all of this get here?” He flaps a hand toward the window. “Who put the trees here, and the houses? Did the first people do that?”

A lot to wrap my head around while I’m wheel-to-wheel with lunatic Boston drivers. “When the world was new, many many years ago,” I begin, “none of this was here. There were no streets, no houses, just nature. Trees, and rivers, and animals. And when humans came around they slowly started adding things to the land, like farms, then streets, and buildings, so over a long time, things began to look how they look now. Does that make sense?”

“I think so,” he said. And he nodded off.

C, Kindergartener, is really ramping up on a lot of crucial topics that are set to become his everyday schoolboy occupations. He’s getting the hang of writing, a bit of math, and stringing letters together to begin to read. But he is still trying to grasp the the concept of time. Even the true length of five minutes is hard for him to comprehend. When he needs to wait for me to do something for him, like get him a snack or put on his favorite show, five minutes, by his reckoning, is just a count to five. But when he’s only got five minutes to play before we leave for school, those brief counts turn into hours. “That wasn’t five minutes!” He’s admant. “That was five seconds!”

So it’s no wonder that history, stretching back into the fog of time, is something he has a lot of questions about. That’s a lot of seconds, minutes, and hours for him to hold in his head. And so many of his fascinations are in the realm of long ago. So in C’s personal timeline, history looks like this:

First: Dinosaurs, of course. Then pyramids, and mummies.

Immediately followed by: Pompeii. His favorite.

Up next: Castles and Playmobil knights.

Which brings us straight to: The Revolutionary War.

Then: Papa is born. Poor Papa.

My own childhood fascination timeline looked something like this: Trilobites. Mummies. Ancient Rome. Barbarians and the Dark Ages. The 1950′s. And then you’re Back to the Future.

I must have also asked my parents constant questions about time, because on a trip to the Smithsonian, they bought me a book called Life Story, by the great Virginia Lee Burton (most famous for The Little House and Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel). I still have the book, and when C asks his questions about the Earth, and what came first then next, and how we got here, we read it together. I still love reading it.

My copy.

It has my name in fourth-grade handwriting inside the front cover, and it’s worn. Published in 1962, it presents the history of the earth as a theatre production, set on a stage, in acts and scenes, beginning with a time when the earth was a “red-hot fiery ball of matter,” and ending in the present, as the seasons change on Burton’s family farm in Massachusetts.

The book beautifully unwinds the tight coil of time into a long, gently turning ribbon; it’s a perfect metaphor. At the beginning of the ribbon is a tiny question mark – the very dawn of everything. The ribbon uncoils, introducing our Sun, and Solar System, and then the book zeroes in on Earth, our home, that fiery ball which cooled and shrank, making mountains like wrinkles. A Geologist on the stage hands over narrator duties to a Paleontologist, who announces the Rains, and the tiny creatures that lived in the great seas that washed over the entire surface of the planet.

Image from childrensbookalmanac.com

Page by page, new players are continually added to the theatre of Life on Earth, from trilobites and cephalopods, to the plants of the ancient forests. I remember, as a child, my favorite page was Act I, Scene 4: Life on the Devonian Shores. From about 350,000,000 years ago, to about 315,000,000 years ago.

“Land plants flourished, clothing our once bare Earth in green…The long Age of Invertebrates had come to an end. Seas, lakes, rivers, and streams swarmed with fish — big fish, little fish, and medium-sized. A few even developed lungs and crawled from puddle to puddle on land.”

In the accompanying picture, strange, curling ferns stretched toward a huge sun, while undersea fish with wide eyes and blunt teeth hunted smaller ones. After I got the book, I was fascinated by the sight of ferns. I tried to imagine that plants very much like the ferns I saw around my town lived millions of years ago, and if I looked at them, and tried to block out everything modern surrounding them, I could take myself back to that long-gone time. I felt like I was trying to recoil all of those ribbons, and hold all of time in my head in a little ball, trying to grasp it all at once, and feel its enormity. It was a great feeling; like a mysterious trance.

[C's current favorite page is Prologue, Scene 4: Introducing first rocks, Igneous rocks. Featuring the world as one giant Vesuvius]

I decorated the inside cover of the book with Pterodactyl ink stamps that my parents bought me on another trip, also when I was about nine. We rented a house in Watkins Glen, on Lake Seneca, in the Finger Lakes of Upstate New York. When we got to the house, the yard and every tree in it was covered in black caterpillar-like things, about an inch-and-a-half long. A plague of gypsy moths. They were everywhere. And they were inside the house, too. Knowing my mother, I am shocked we did not get back in the blue station wagon and go immediately back to Long Island to spend the week in the sprinker on our smooth, concrete driveway. But we stayed.

We went to Watkins Glen State Park, where we bought the stamper in a gift shop at the end of a gorge trail. I don’t know if it’s still there, but at the beginning of the trail, I remember a railing with a timeline on it that took you further and further back into history with every step: past the fifties, the birth of Papa, Lexington and Concord, the plague, and the pyramids. To 350,000,000 years ago. And at the end of the railing, you emerged onto the trail, in the gorge, and back at the dawn of time.

This wasn’t like looking at a backyard fern and blocking out the garage and the concrete and the chain-link fence. The primordial world was all around us, without interruption, unbound. There were fossils in the huge walls of Devonian shale that formed the sides of the gorge, which was cut into the earth by a gentle creek flowing on and on over eons. There were plants – huge trees, as well as ferns and mosses, that had been growing there always. And the sounds – rushing water, wind in leaves – were the same sounds the first people must have heard as they walked through that same place thousands of years ago. All that was new were the railings that contained us, stopped us from falling down below, to a bottom I couldn’t see. And the gift shop, that was new too.

Watkins Glen, New York (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I was enrapt, there in the gorge. I felt like I was actually winding back the clock, seeing what life was like before there were streets, and towns, or even foot-beaten trails in the woods. It was amazing. And now, as I listen to his questions, his car-ride conversations, I see C trying to to get to that same place, trying to wrap his head around history, or rather, wrap up history in his head, just like I used to do. I can sense him entering that wonderful trancelike state, playing with the ribbon of time between his fingers.

I need to take him to that gorge. And Pompeii. And a million other places.

As an adult, how do you get that back? How do you let your mind become unbound, unconstrained, uncoiled? How do you allow yourself to imagine the hugeness of the earth, of time, of everything? How can you keep that nerve that lets you believe you can hold it all in your head? Can we do this, can we thread it between traffic jams, and to-do lists, our grown-up cares?  Or do we need to achieve this through our children, let them out of their restraints, watch them as they try understand the world into which they were dropped?

Richard Scarry and the tiny world of toddlers

Busytown (Photo credit: stephen_bolen)

My “four-and-a-half boy” is bombastic. He’s larger than life. He takes up all the air in the room sometimes, with his charming, perplexing talk of Star Wars, and preschool politics, and numbers larger than “a trillion-ninety-nine.” C and his interests take up most of the word count in this blog too, so I thought I’d write a little post dedicated to the toddler, T, whom I still call the baby, at 22 months old. While C is often in the middle of the living room, kicking up a fuss, T is quietly in the corner, kicking a*s.

He’s happy zooming his dad’s seventies-era Matchbox cars around, pausing for a sip of milk (not chocolate), and an animal cracker. He likes to put the dirty laundry into the machine, and the clean, folded laundry back into his hamper. He likes to color, on paper and on walls. He can sing two songs: the theme to Spectacular Spider-Man – which is an amazing theme song by the way – and the Ladybug’s Picnic song from Sesame Street, which he learned in his music class. When C won’t leave the playground at school pick-up, T picks up his jacket and lunch box for him and gives him a little nudge toward the door. And when C builds enormous Star Wars-inspired spaceships out of Legos and wooden blocks, T is there to knock them back down to earth.

Right now, he really loves Richard Scarry books. The big, tabloid-sized hardcover ones. He carries them around the house, dropping them at (or on) my feet when he wants to read them. Which is most of the time. We have Cars and Trucks and Things That Go, Busy Busy Town, and Best First Book Ever! , to name just a few. We sit together and point out all the props of our busy days: breakfast things and household tools, clothes, toys, shops on Main Street, farm machines, the vrooming beasts of the highway, railway, and airport. And there all of the characters that you meet in Busytown: Lowly the worm, Huckle Cat, polite pigs and rude ones, the hapless Mr Frumble who can never catch his fedora, carpenters, police officers, teachers, big brothers. Mice in a little cheese car.

Busytown (Photo credit: stephen_bolen)

We even have a few Richard Scarry books in Italian – I’ve mentioned before how I am trying to keep the language in my kids’ ears, and here is one way I try to do it. A relative brought Scarry’s Primo Dizionario back from Rome for me, when I was little, and now we look at that, and Il Libro delle Parole, and remember all the words that that we used to know, long ago.

These kind of pages, like this one I’ve scanned in above from Il Libro delle Parole, are T’s favorite. They show all kinds of tiny things, things that we, as grown-ups, lay our eyes all the time, but never stop to notice. The yellow-orange of an egg yolk, a ripple on a slice of bacon, knives and forks we toss in a drawer. But T, with his brand-new eyes, notices them all the time. In his little world, everything is novel and fascinating. Scarry has done an incredible job of picking up on that, cataloguing a toddler’s unjaded world in miniature. C, at nearly five, has moved on from this a little bit, setting his sights now on bigger, more fantastic realms – the night sky, mythical beasts, Tatooine.

But T is still awed by what’s in front of him, and he notices things that neither C nor I do. Tiny bugs, little flowers growing between rocks in the driveway. Butterflies are always in his peripheral vision. He hears a distant airplane and can spot in in the clouds long before I can. Robins hopping along a park path are meant to be followed until they fly away, and he watches them till they are completely out of view. His eyes are like microscopes, trained on the tiniest details. He will often pick up a cookie crumb off the patterned living room rug, show it to me, then throw it in the kitchen trash. How does he even see it? Maybe he’s trying to tell me something about my housekeeping.

Right now, I’m happy to accept T’s little gifts of crumbs and leaves and polliwogs, and share in his thrill at the sight of a duck or a dump truck. And I look forward to turning more minutes into hours with T and Richard Scarry, reveling in the little things that in time we forget to see. Soon enough, he’ll move on to bigger things, I know. I’ve seen it happen all too quickly before.

T’s little world.

“Girls’ books” — for boys

A boy in a girl’s world: Jonathan Crombie as Gilbert Blythe in Anne of Green Gables. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Last night, C was anxious to read a library book that his dad had gotten for him called All About Alfie, by Shirley Hughes. It is a longish picture book with four stories in it, so it satisfies both C’s love of picture books and his excitement to read big-kid chapter books. Alfie is an impish English boy of about three, who gets into little scrapes, like locking himself in the house as the neighborhood comes to his rescue outside, and being at home with a babysitter while a pipe bursts, and he worries, like Noah, he’ll be swept away.

C was engrossed as his dad came in, who remarked, “He loves books about little boys like himself.” And I said, “Right! So why do you hate Caillou so much? Do you not read my internationally-known blog?” I guess not (off my good list). I wrote a post a while back in which I yammered on a bit about the fact that though adults despise the small, bald Canadian, children love him because they can relate to him and his everyday childhood experiences.

It made me think back to when I was a kid, and when people asked me what kinds of books I liked to read (and I liked to read a lot), I would say, “books that are true to life.” Meaning, I did not really want to read fantasy, or science fiction, but books about girls, like me, and what they did and felt on their typical days.

Even now, I still feel that way about the books and TV I consume, to a certain extent – I guess that’s why I am so hesitant about Game of Thrones (even though I HEARD YOU it is supposedly awesome, once you get past all the murdering), and, of course, Star Wars, but I love Mad Men (not my time, but my tri-state area, and many relatable experiences). I can already hear my husband saying that although Game of Nerds, uh, Thrones and Star Wars take place in fictional worlds, there is a humanity to the characters that is relatable. OK, but I like a setting in which I can imagine myself, or someone like me. I’m sorry, I can’t imagine myself getting eaten by a Sarlacc (thank you to C for explaining, several times, what that is and how it burps). Look, it’s not scientific, OK? It’s just a preference. Some people like to get lost in fantasy worlds; I don’t like it. I’d rather get lost in the streets of London or New York.

So my girlhood favorites? Lois Lowry’s Anastasia Krupnik (an awkward, smart girl in Cambridge, Mass.), Constance C. Greene’s A Girl Called Al (awkward, smart, NYC), and Beverly Cleary’s Ramona Quimby, of course (awkward, smart, Portland, Ore.). See what I’m getting at here? There are several others. Judy Blume, Harriet the Spy,  All-of-a-Kind Family. But the queen of them all is Anne of Green Gables by L.M. Montgomery. Awkward. Smart. Prince Edward Island, Canada. I went there twice; I reenacted crucial scenes. I saw the musical. I even got engaged there, to my own, real-life Gilbert Blythe, at the Inn at Bay Fortune, which is where Colleen Dewhurst lived when she was filming the miniseries.

I knew that C was going to be a boy, but when I was pregnant, I read Anne of Green Gables aloud to him. I’m not sure why. I think because I feel that book is such a part of me, that in some way, he would get to understand me through the book, if there was anything to even be understood at that point in his development. Or maybe, if I was going to be reading aloud to someone who may or may not even be listening, I might as well read out something I enjoy. Now that he and his little brother are here, and on my lap, wanting to be read to, I think I still will read them that book someday. For the reasons stated above.

I know Anne of Green Gables is considered a “girls’ book,” and I doubt that many boys read it, but why should that be? Initially, I thought: I can’t wait to share Anne with my nieces (Hi J & Z! Not that you are reading this — you are 6 years and 3 weeks old, respectively) But then I thought, says who? Why not the boys too? There are elements of the book that perhaps apply more to girlhood, and friendships amongst girls, but there is so much, too, that anyone would enjoy and learn from. About how to accept yourself the way that you are. How to celebrate the beauty and simplicity of life. How to find magic and wonder in nature. How to be a good friend, how to be a good student, how to forgive. And (dare I say it?) how to be a good boyfriend. They don’t come much better than Gilbert Blythe.

The same goes for Harriet the Spy, and Pippi Longstocking, and Ramona Quimby for sure – they will all be part of my boys’ canon, though they are thought of more as books for girls. But I am also seeking books in which boys take the leading roles. Books that celebrate boyhood. On Earth. What is the Caillou of books about boys? Which characters speak to the everyday experiences of boys? It seems that many of the books that men I know loved as children had a genre slant to them. They were mysteries, science fiction, or adventure books. The Phantom Tollbooth, for example. It’s an incredible book, and at the top of our reading list, but what are some equally well-written books that are just plain about growing up? For books that feature boys, I can only think of Encyclopedia Brown (good, but mystery – we’ll be reading those shortly). Then there is Captain Underpants (yeesh – but C already loves it). Tales of a Fourth-Grade Nothing by Judy Blume is the best example I can think of; it’s waiting in the wings. Speaking of Judy Blume, she wrote a book about a boy called Then Again, Maybe I Won’t. And when I think of reading that as a young girl and not understanding why he wore a raincoat to school, I think, then again, maybe I won’t read that out loud to my boys and leave that bit of literature up to them and their dad. (Sorry, I couldn’t resist.)

I have a seemingly endless list of books I want my boys to experience. But does anyone have any to add? Books in which C and T might see themselves reflected. And not eaten by a Sarlacc. Get on my good list and leave a comment.