If anyone were to ask me–and nobody ever does–I would tell them that, before I had a kid, my notions of what parenthood would be like were vague. Mostly just a montage of smiling and rocking a baby and then maybe I’d throw in a toddler on a Big Wheel at the end. The montage would probably be set to the Beatles’ “Good Day, Sunshine,” because it’s not for broadcast use and I wouldn’t have to pay for music rights. —
Anyway, none of the specifics of child-rearing ever entered my head: what to do at 3AM when the kid wakes up with a fever, the worry of having a kid that won’t eat, the arduous task of finding daycare. (Full disclosure, or my wife will kill me: I didn’t do all that much with the daycare. But I hear it was arduous.)
One thing that never really occurred to me was the excitement and anticipation of sharing what you love with your kid.
There was a time in the first months when there was nothing I shared with my son other than, “Neither of us is getting enough sleep and we’re both cranky.” And that’s not much on which to hang a father-son relationship. But once he was old enough to do more than just sleep, nurse and cry, we gained a bit more common ground.
We had started reading to him in the womb. (I think I may have started trying to read David Copperfield to my wife’s belly, but I gave that up somewhere before Chapter 2.) We continued after he emerged, but, of course, it took awhile before he showed any appreciation of the written word.
Like everyone, we started off with the obvious choices. Your Goodnight Moon. Your Where the Wild Things Are. Your The Cat in the Hat Comes Back (the sequel which I’ve always felt superior to the original.) Then, on a trip to my parents’ house, I snagged a book my sister and I had read and read and read when we were kids: Rabbit Finds a Way.
The story concerns Rabbit’s Saturday morning trek to his friend Bear’s house. Bear is a fantastic baker. He has a weekly ritual of baking carrot cake on Saturdays. After a few stops on the road, Rabbit makes it to Bear’s, only to find that Bear has slept in and there is no offer of carrot cake forthcoming. After absorbing the disappointment, Rabbit returns home where–spoilers!–he decides to make the carrot cake himself. The last page is an illustration filled with the forty or so varieties of carrot cakes he’s churned out: cupcakes and loaf cakes and tortes and all manner of cream cheese-frosted deliciousness.
As kids, my sister and I would linger over this last page and ritualistically choose which type of carrot cake each of us wanted that particular day. (I was always partial to the tortes.)
This is not a classic in the Madeline sense. There were no cartoons. No sequels. No Rabbit balloon in the Macy’s parade. But my sister and I loved it. Re-reading it as an adult, there are problems. Rabbit has something of a sense of entitlement. He’s a bit of a freeloader. Once he finds out there’s no cake, he acts sulky and doesn’t want to hang out with Bear anymore. But I still liked it, despite the flaws. So I read it to my kid.
And he loved it, too. He liked the voice I did for Rabbit’s friend, Duck. He loved that Rabbit pauses on his journey to help Squirrel cut wood for the porch she’s building. Mostly, he loved the last page, full of the various cakes. There were a good few weeks where he wanted it read to him every night.
It didn’t last, of course. These things, I’ve learned, are cyclical. (Ask me how many times I was forced to read one of the inferior latter-day Curious George books when it was in favor. ‘Til we hid it.) But Rabbit Finds a Way is still in our regular mix and it gets read every one or two weeks.
And I get a little thrill every time my son looks at that last page and picks out which carrot cake is his choice for the evening. Because he’s doing exactly what I used to do.
Joe Wack currently teaches science to elementary school children in the
Bronx. He lives in Harlem with his wife and 3-year-old son. For more on Joe, see our
contributors list to the right.
