It's more than just a book
I wasn't quite prepared for this
Monday through Friday, I publish a short,, hopefully relatable musing about fatherhood and all that it encompasses. Thank you for reading.
“Did you show daddy what books I brought home?” my wife asked our daughter.
Without saying a word, Ada marched to the front door, picked up two books, and walked them over to me.
“It’s Winnie-the-Pooh!” she exclaimed.
Something unexpected appeared in my throat in that moment; it a ball of feelings that I couldn’t quite swallow.
The books were simple and beautiful in design with a faded red cover and an ever-so-slight debossing on the words and Pooh, not to mention the heavenly smell of a book that’s been marinating on a shelf for a handful of decades. The copyright was 1961 — older than both of my parents. The illustrations that accompany the stories were rather more like sketches, etched by the hands of none other than Ernest Howard Shepard; there wasn’t a person alive that could’ve better captured the whimsical spirit of Pooh through the words of Milne better than he.
As beautiful as it was, the emotion I was feeling wasn’t so much toward the physical books as it was thinking back to the months upon months we spent reading all of Pooh Bear’s adventures; It was the first real book we’d ever read together as a family. Ada was three then. With each turn of the page, memories came flooding back. And then I opened up the Tiddely-Pom song, sung by Pooh and Piglet in the chapter In which a house is built at Pooh Corner for Eeyore.
“Do you wanna sing the Tiddely-Pom song with me?” I asked her.
“Ya!” she shrieked.
“Okay, you do the Tiddely-Poms.”
“Like Piglet!”
“Yes, dear. Like Piglet.”
And so we began:
The more it snows (Tiddely-pom)
The more it goes (Tiddely-pom)
The more it goes (Tiddely-pom)
On snowing
And nobody knows (Tiddely-pom)
How cold my toes (Tiddely-pom)
How cold my toes (Tiddely-pom)
Are growing
I suppose it’s obvious in hindsight, but I don’t think I gave much thought to how sentimental I’d feel about books after having read them with my daughter. You fall in love with the characters and their adventures, granted, but then those characters and adventures become tied to chapters in your lives and that’s what makes them so special.
I am flying for work this week and I’ve already decided I’ll be bringing Winnie-the-Pooh with me. I’ll be the man in his mid-30s laughing to himself as he reads a 100-year-old “children’s book” about a bear, a pig, and a miserable donkey, wishing he would be home for bedtime so he could read aloud to his family.
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This is so sweet.