One of the amazing things about reading to a young child is the fact that they want to hear the same story over and over and over.
I wonder, is it new for them each time? Or is the pleasure in the comfort of knowing what the next line will be before they hear it?
Is there any story I would like to hear over and over again?
As someone who has moved thirty-three times in my life, I don’t have very many possessions left from my childhood. In fact, I have only this one: The Just So Stories by Rudyard Kipling.
I know it is my book because my full name is written in pencil on the flyleaf. But since there were six children in my family, I have a suspicion that the book might have originally belonged to one of my older brothers, whose name I erased in order to write in my own.
Another thing I notice about the book is that some of the delightful ink drawings have been colored in—badly—with crayon and pencil. I can’t believe I would have done such a thing. I remember taking pride in how carefully I colored—always staying neatly inside the lines of the coloring book.
I think a much younger child must have wantonly colored over these illustrations—a child who couldn’t actually read this book and therefore had no respect for it.
I doubt the mystery will ever be resolved, but I plan to grill my daughter and granddaughter about it the next time I see them.
I believe I was brought up to never deface a book. My parents had great respect for books even though neither of them had finished high school and they subscribed to Readers Digest condensed book-of-the-month. It doesn’t matter what they read. They were readers.
My favorite story in the Just So book was “How The Leopard Got Its Spots,” perhaps because I loved the power and beauty of a big cat. Like all the stories in this book, there is a seemingly practical and natural reason to explain every aspect of the creatures on this earth. The reason is completely fanciful, of course, but told in a way that entertains both children and the adults reading to them.
My only attempt to write a children’s book was to solve a real-life problem: my very young daughter hated to have her hair washed when I gave her a bath. So I wrote a story about such a little girl, whose mother, in exasperation, finally said to her, “OK, Martha, you don’t have to have your hair washed ever again.”
Martha was very happy at first not to get her hair washed. But as her hair became tangly and greasy and all knotted up and itchy, and birds started nesting in it, in the end she begged her mother to wash it.
My children’s story did not go over that great with my daughter. She never asked to have it read to her again the way she wanted me to read other stories over and over to her.
So I think a good children’s story may have a message as long as it doesn’t hit you over the head. But what it must have is delight. There was nothing delightful about Martha’s dirty hair.
