Of Snakes Sex Playing in the Rain, Random Thou by Clay Reynolds Read Free Book Online Page B

single Richard Scarry book more than twice in a given week. But somehow, I managed to be handed one I’ve never seen before each evening’s “Weadbook!” The tiny hands and pleading eyes that accompanied the presentation of the evening’s reading matter utterly defeated my resolve to avoid at any cost another trip down the lunacy-lined, twisting imbecility of Scarry Lane.
    Thus, every night I found myself again ponderously trying to get the Pig Family from point A to point B while explaining why rabbits walk off piers, why only one out of nine boats is sinking, where the pickles on every page come from, why the kitty dropped the nails on the road to give the hippo’s car a flat tire, and how a tiny mouse can drive a giant dump truck that spilled the pickles that distracted the kitty that dropped the nails that caused the flat that confused the dog that upset the rhino who scared the worm and caused all of the problems that plague all of the characters that live in the books that Scarry built.
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    So I hate Richard Scarry’s books. But my children loved them. The blue-eyed wonder these books evoked was unrivaled by any other volumes in our library; and, I must grudgingly admit, the kids learned from them; and, I must grudgingly confess, so did I. Through his multifarious menagerie, Scarry demonstrates that all people, big and little, make mistakes and have accidents; he illustrates that everyone, no matter what station in life, faces pleasure and disaster and learns, somehow, to get through the day, even so; he dramatizes the ideal that the best attitude to take is not to blame or grieve in regret, but to learn from our actions and to improve our outlook, for tomorrow’s misadventures will probably be no less traumatic and challenging than today’s.
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    Most importantly, Scarry shows that there is humor and wisdom in human folly. Scarry’s genius, wit, and sense of the absurdist dimensions of life’s comedy are perfectly designed to charm and prick the imagination of the very young. They, after all, are the audience he seeks, not some grouchy adult with one eye on the clock and who would rather be sailing off with the owl and the pussycat or eating bread and honey in the court of Old King Cole than wandering aimlessly around with the Pig Family, crawling along with Lowly Worm, and finding the ever-elusive Goldbug.
    And if I had to answer a few hundred—or thousand—questions along the way, what of it? That’s what being a parent is mostly about, and what did I have to do that was truly more important? Besides, who’s a better arbiter of the quality of what Scarry does than the children themselves? The very fact that Scarry’s mindless, comic fictions excite questions, curiosity, and attention gives them the indelible stamp of worth as children’s literature of the first order. In the meantime, the House at Pooh Corner, Mount Olympus, and Shakespeare’s magical tales were still around when the children were ready for them; somehow, I think that the sweetness and delight of Richard Scarry’s fertile imagination better prepare kids to appreciate them.

TEA TIME ON THE GREEN: OR DOUBLE-BOGEY AT 8:00
    “A game whereby one attempts to put a very small ball
    into an even smaller hole with tools
    singularly ill-designed for the purpose.”
    —Winston Churchill

    A couple of years ago, I took up golf, more or less seriously. Well, at least more or less regularly. As a youngster in West Texas, I had played on the hardscrabble courses of our county country club (I won’t ponder the absurdity of a mostly rural county having a “country club”), but I’d found the game to be more hot and bothersome than anything like fun. Fairways consisted mostly of pounded farmland covered by a bad comb-over of weeds punctuated by rocks; greens more closely resembled worn patches of shag carpeting, haphazardly trimmed; roughs in that rustic geography consisted of mesquite thickets where rattlesnakes and devil’s claw