Books for your baby

Creative people are curious, flexible, persistent, and independent with a tremendous spirit of adventure and a love of play.  

-- Henri Matisse

Do you remember the first book you read? What do you remember about it? Why did you like it?

If you could recommend only one book to new parents, what would you choose?

I have a friend who is about to become a mother. We have known each other since we were in elementary school and grew up singing in the church choir together. I have several friends who are now parents, but no one that I have known since we were young children ourselves. Instead of a card for her baby shower, the hosts asked that we bring a book for the baby.

This is where my dilemma lies. How do I choose just one?

I like nonsense, it wakes up the brain cells.  Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living, it's a way of looking at life through the wrong end of a telescope.  Which is what I do, and that enables you to laugh at life's realities.  

-- Theodore Geisel (Dr. Seuss)

My parents read to me nearly every night in my waterbed, sometimes one or the other drifted off mid-story only to have me shake them awake again. “You haven’t finished the story,” I would tell that night’s reader. “You were snoring.”

First come the picture books. I had a ton of Dr. Seuss books, of course. Cat in the Hat. Green Eggs and Ham. Horton. Yertle. I think I’ve read them all.

I recall my favorite being “And to Think That I Saw it on Mulberry Street.” I loved the illustrations, as the adventure grew from a man and a tired horse drawing a cart to a zebra and a chariot, racing down Mulberry Street.

I walked to and from school for much of my childhood, much like the child in the book. Middle school was a forty minute walk one way; high school twenty-five. Middle school was in a quiet neighborhood. I passed many old houses, cars parked on the side of the streets, usually with my cd player blasting music in my ears. I loved the houses that looked like converted barns and the painted ladies. Some streets had more than others. I knew the dogs on my route, too, some of them by name if I was able to read their tags. I was always on the look for things out of the ordinary, but these experiences were rare.

It was high school in downtown that offered daily changes, for at least half the walk anyway. And here, I remembered “Mulberry Street.” The diversity of what I saw every day elongated my imagination. There were new drivers everywhere. Kids in junky cars and fancy alike. I rode my bike. But I liked to imagine sometimes that my bike turned into a fashionable scooter, painted in tangerine stripes. Wouldn’t that be grand? Or a motorcycle like my dad’s, a BMW. Or maybe I was stylin’ in a candy red sports car, taking my friends for a cruise to one of the drive-thrus right by school.

There are other books I remember too. The first book I read by myself -- “Blueberries for Sal,” by Robert McCloskey (he also wrote “Make Way for Ducklings” and “Homer Price”). It was in the library of my kindergarten classroom. I confess, I didn’t remember the name of book, but I remembered the story. A girl and her mother go hunting blueberries. As I paged through the book via Amazon, the memory of sitting in my kindergarten classroom, squatting on the floor, flashed in my head. I remember loving the drawings in the book first and then beginning to piece the words into sentences. I wanted to go hunting for blueberries too.

In our classroom, there was an art section, a library section and a playhouse section, set up like a kitchen. Some days, I was the dog, but on a few occasions, I was Sal, hunting for blueberries in the forest. And I’m sure on a few days I was Sal the dog, hunting for blueberries.
 

I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.
― Albert Einstein

Imagination, departure to another world, it builds a child to live in a world in which we need to be flexible. To roll with the punches life throws. Find a solution to a plaguing problem. And often times, books serve as an escape, or to educate about the unknown.

Another of my favorites is “Ferdinand the Bull”, by Munro Leaf, about a baby bull who liked to spend his days calmly smelling the flowers. The illustrations are drawn in a striking display of white and black. The setting is Spain, a country famous for bull fights. (There is also a cartoon: Ferdinand the Bull -- Walt Disney)

I like the sentiment of a male bull, expected to fight and act fierce, but all this boy wants to do is take in the beauty around him on the farm. People and other cows alike expect Ferdinand to be a fierce, spitting, ferocious bull, but he isn’t. His mother is concerned, but in the end, she just wants him to be happy -- to be Ferdinand.

Stories that challenge stereotypes, like Ferdinand, have immense power for young children. I like to think they did for me. As a child, I wanted to play with my dump truck and bury my Barbies in my sandbox, narrating their horrified noises as the sand closed in on them. I wanted to wear baseball caps, skate on a borrowed board and race my bike down the street. I’m sure my mom would have prefered I played dress up in clothes that were pretty and sparkly instead of the overalls and fake beard I favored. But just like Ferdinand’s mother, she and my dad let me be who I was.

I’m not a parent, but I was a child once. Through the books that my parents and I read together, I grew to know worlds beyond my own. I learned to use my imagination. I learned to love literature. I hope that my friend’s child grows to learn to not to be afraid to be herself and to live many lives through the books she will explore, reading some of them until they fall apart. Most of all, I hope she learns to like the books I give her the most. I am a writer after all.