Home

About Homedaddy

Archives

Subscribe

Tell A Newspaper

Contact

Music

Publisher's Area

A Child's Garden of Curses

During infancy, parents enjoy the luxury of the power to choose all reading material, a luxury that is nearly always taken for granted. Most new parents insist that Junior, at three months of age, exhibits a strong preference for "Pat the Bunny" over "The Runaway Bunny," the two works being, as they are, diametrically opposed in both style and content. In reality, you might as well read the phone book in a singsong tone; the Little One is mentally occupied with the fact that your lips are moving and sounds are coming out.

This all changes soon enough, and as your child becomes seduced by the power to make decisions, she is likely to become vehemently partisan in her selection of reading material. To the parents, this will be the cutest thing in the world until you discover that she means business. After reading the favorite out loud to her day and night over a period of months, you'll be able to recite the entire thing by heart, and certain passages will stick in your mind the way bits of popular songs used to, back when you had the time to listen to music by people other than Raffi.

Eventually, you will see the illustrations and the text from the pages emblazoned like neon images on the insides of your eyelids as you try to sleep, and you will curse the day you ever allowed this book into your home, and you will plot secret revenge against the friend or relative who sent this little "gift" in the first place.

I am generally very tolerant of Emma's choices with the exception of anything by Richard Scarry (pronounced, appropriately enough, "Scary"). For some reason, this guy's work just gets under my skin. Perhaps it's the annoying illustrations and whimsically sociopathic plot lines (car crashes, police chases, and absent-minded people stepping off then ends of piers); or perhaps it's the text that reads as though it was written in a tribal New Guinea dialect and translated back to English by Dan Quayle. The impressive popularity of these books speaks to my limitations as an arbiter of public taste.

Thankfully, Emma's attentions have turned elsewhere. For the past six months she has been obsessed with a book called "Elbert's Bad Word" by Audrey Wood. It's the story of a boy who overhears an adult say a bad word, which floats past like a little cloud. The boy grabs it and saves it, with the predictable result that it slips out at a very inopportune moment. He is briefly punished, and then learns to use "strong" words, rather than bad words in order to express his feelings, which results in a much-needed happy ending. All in all, a nifty little tale.

Well, maybe for the first few hundred times. By now, Emma's interest has distilled down to a desire to learn the bad word. I've been stonewalling, pleading ignorance, so Emma has promoted Elbert to the position of Imaginary Playmate, the better to interrogate him for the secret information. Hopefully, by the time she learns it, she won't notice that I've removed the book from the premises.

But if she does, that word will come in handy.

send this column to a friend!
have a comment about this column?

© Todd Pinsky 1998-2002. All rights reserved.