Inanimate objects with personality

Dear Aunt Debbie,

We await the birthday box of books with great anticipation!

A Flock of Shoes sounds wonderful.  There's something so appealing about giving personalities to inanimate objects.  Yesterday afternoon, Eleanor and I were having ice cream cones in the playground (and giving the eager Isabel licks from a spoon), and I was reminded of one of your gifts to us: the book Things That Sometimes Happen: Very Short Stories for Little Listeners, by Avi, with illustrations by Marjorie Priceman.

There are a lot of wonderful things about this book: the nine very short stories with simple, imaginative, funny plots; Priceman's vivid, sweeping gouache paintings.  There are animals (a hippopotamus who wants to buy a new car), and people (a little boy who makes himself small so he can run between the raindrops to get his mother some bread from the store), and there are some wonderful inanimate objects, each of which wants nothing more than to be of use.

In "The Story of the Glass of Water and the Elephant," the Glass of Water complains about having no one to drink him: "'I do wish,' the Glass of Water said to himself, 'I do wish somebody would drink me.  A Glass of Water needs to have somebody to drink the water or it is no good.'"  Happily, the Glass of Water meets a thirsty Elephant, and it all works out.

"The Black Crayon" begins: "A Black Crayon was feeling very unhappy because nobody used him very much.  All the other crayons, the red crayon, the blue crayon, all the different ones, were getting shorter and shorter.  But the Black Crayon was staying very much the same size."

He convinces a Little Girl to draw a picture of the nighttime, with lots of black, and everyone is happy.  The fate of "The Melting Ice Cream Cone" is not as rosy: though he wants to be eaten, he melts while two bears argue over who should take the first lick.  I love the sense in all three stories that everyone just wants to fulfill their role in life.

I can't write about Things That Sometimes Happen without mentioning the story "Going to Work," in which a Little Boy agrees to take his Papa's place at the office when his Papa has to stay home sick with a cold.  The description of an adult workplace is both clearly simplified and totally accurate: "After his Mama had made him a lunch, the Little Boy went to work.  When he got to work, he sat at a desk and said yes and no to a lot of people.  Then he picked up the telephone and spoke to some more people.  Then he looked at some papers.  Every once in a while he had some coffee."  Yep, that's pretty much how it goes some days.

Love, Annie

Back to the beat

Dear Annie,

Doonesbury: what a great idea.

I know I did an about-face in my last post: from jazz and rhythm for toddlers to war for pre-teens.  Sorry about that (to use a Vietnam War-coined phrase).  So now that I've scanned a few pictures from music books into my computer, I'll lurch back to little ones and music.

You hit the two of the best books on rhythm, so I want to move on to more classical fare.  Starting with the delightfully illustrated
Zin! Zin! a Violin by Lloyd Moss. It introduces ten instruments, one page at a time, starting with the trombone:

With mournful moan and silken tone,

Itself along comes ONE TROMBONE.

Gliding, sliding, high notes go low;

ONE TROMBONE is playing SOLO.

I can imagine your household, with your talent for accents and singing.  Next, the trumpet, giving the enthusiastic feel of Marjorie Priceman's pictures:

It goes on through cello, harp, clarinet and more.  Then they file onto a stage, and play:

The STRINGS all soar, the REEDS implore,

The BRASSES roar with notes galore.

It's music that we all adore.

It's what we go to concerts for.

A happy line of hand-holding cats, dog, and a mouse boogie across the bottom of the page.

And speaking of concerts, I'm ending with my favorite book for young concert-goers:
 
The Philharmonic Gets Dressed
by Karla Kuskin.  It fits into the tradition of Ramona wondering about Mike Mulligan going to the bathroom.  In this one, we follow the getting-ready rituals of many of the 105 members of an orchestra:

First they get washed.  There are ninety-two men and thirteen women.  Many take showers.  A few take baths.  Two men and three women run bubblebaths, and one man reads in the tub while the cat watches. One woman sits in the bubbles and sings.

They dry off, put on underwear (boxers and briefs for the men, and an array of early '80s underwear for the women), each step with Marc Simont's  illustrations of six or more people, each doing things slightly differently:

There are ties and overcoats and saying goodbye and getting transportation to the concert hall.  The book ends with "the man with the black and white wavy hair" (we've been following him too) stepping onto the podium, raising his baton, and starting the music.

What I love about this book is that it takes seriously all those little steps which can dominate parts of the day for small children, and which adults tend not to mention much (see Miss Binney, in Ramona quote referenced above).  And it turns a somewhat confusing crowd of grown-ups into people who put on their pants (mostly) one leg at a time.

Love,
Deborah