Cracking The Nut

When I was very young, books and the stories they contained allowed me to visualize worlds I only sometimes visited in my dreams. I saw the characters on the page strung together like code at first, unsure of how to handle the demands of abstraction, but later impressed by my ability to sink into a great story like burrowing myself into bedsheets. Our household had the first-print poetry volume Alligator Pie by Denis Lee and illustrator Frank Newfeld, its pages containing surreal images of fat alleymen, gigantic cakes and sewer alligators in a uniquely warm and Canadian fashion, the literary equivalent of a deep-fried beavertail. Lee's work, much like that of Shel Silverstein, formed a strange vernacular in my head and preceeded any knowledge I had of Dr. Seuss' work; to this day his poem "The Friends" reminds me of cascading sunlight in my front living room, me poring over the book while my parents chatted away in some other room.

My education in literacy continued with Beverly Cleary's tale about a mouse living in an inn, Ralph S. Mouse (1982), itself a follow-up to Clearly's previous entries about the talking rodent The Mouse and the Motorcycle and Runaway Ralph. The world Clearly created was populated by a late 1970s idealism, when schoolyard fights were common and the weary were comforted by the evening news. I would read Ralph S. Mouse under my bed in the hopes of catching my own mouse, though I can't figure what I would have done to fashion his vehicle.

Later came Judy Blume's Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing and Jean Little's Little By Little, each detailing struggle; while Blume's book focused primarily on the complex concept of sharing love in a family, Little's book recounted her sometimes-troubled youth as girl losing her sight and her hold on all things intangible. Thanks to those authors, I think I began to think about my place in the world and started to realize I wasn't exactly the centre of attention, though I can't say I've completed voided myself of the habit of being self-centred. Along the way, I also caught books like The Cricket in Times Square, C.S. Lewis' Narnia Chronicles, classics like Ivanhoe and H.G. Wells' The Invisible Man, each time digesting entire nations, customs, lingoes and conundrums whole. It was, I believe, from Danny and the Champion of The World that I learned about the cruel nature of the poorest among us, and of course, how to stoke the ire of game-hunters by quietly making pheasants drunk on rum. Even at this young age, I was precocious enough to wonder if that would work.

Children's books are so often responsible for the way in which we perceive ourselves, and often they are chiefly responsible for elevating our self-concept, bolstering us with confidence, teaching kindness and perhaps to a fault, for imagining the world as though it isn't. Unfiltered, this imagination is a classroom raveled, its manifestation scolded, its lifeblood rehashed in parent-teacher interviews. And this saddens me. Who now extends his arm into the sky looking for Vernicious Knids, or holds tightly to his mother's hands when a game board erupts into violent mayhem? In the most important way, the work of Chris Van Allsburg (The Polar Express), or Mordechai Richler (Jacob Two-Two and the Hooded Fang) is in laying the seeds of chaos for children to keep dormant until adult doldrums reawakens it. Unfortunately, for many of us, these seeds are never in good enough shape to grow, however; we lose the ability to view Beatrix Potter the way we once did and we find ourselves only ironically amused by A.A. Milne. But the real impact these books have, on me and on you (I'm certain) is their ability to make us pare away distraction to make way for our self-reinvention. How do I know this?

It's evident in the language of Robert Munsch. If you chance upon a friend unmoved by Munsch's ode to his stillborn babies, Love You Forever, all may be lost. Let's all chime in...

"I'll love you forever,
I'll like you for always,
as long as I'm living
my baby you'll be."
- Robert Munsch