Happy Birthday,Maurice Sendak!!!!

For all of my literary-minded mania, I do not often write about children's books.Kiddie lit was but a brief phase in my reading life.I more or less went from zero to eighty, contentedly reading dictionaries by the age of five. Yet I had my nursery-school favourites. Chief among them was the "Little Bear" series by Elsa Holmelund Minarik. Little Bear lived in a quiet,home-spun,cozy world where he was loved by his parents and friends of various species,got into and out of minor scrapes unscathed and was encouraged to use his imagination, complete with home-made props.
The best thing about the books were the illustrations by Maurice Sendak.He is recognized and revered for "Where the Wild Things Are",and rightly so,but he has a place in my childhood sense-memories for perfectly capturing the Bear clan.I still have my copy of the stories, which came to me second-hand.I believe that my mother was the original owner, as she is the appropriate age for a volume initially published in the late 1950's.Every time that I spy the dark-blue cover on my shelf, I smile.
A few years ago, I tried explaining to The Chef the nature of Little Bear's appeal.He had never heard of him. I pulled the book from the shelf and flipped it open, explaining to The Chef the gentle and moral whimsy of what it contained.(The words gentle and moral whimsy do not exactly describe my adult self but they are nice attributes to instill in children,at any rate.)It opened to the story of Little Bear pretending he was flying to the moon, complete with cardboard-box space-suit.If I was a slang slinger, I could only call the illustrations adorbs.I'm not, so I will state that they are sweet and endearing.The Chef was baffled,and I never did get my point across.
Little Bear and his low-key,uplifting adventures were special to me as a very young child.They have remained indelible across the space of 30 years because of Maurice Sendak.He endowed Little Bear with a personality and curiosity not entirely present in the writing.I have kept only a handful of books from my youngest years.This volume made the cut because it is one of the few children's books that I could ever imagine reading to my own offspring.