“It’s no use to go back to yesterday, because I was a different person then.”

---Lewis Carroll, “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

It’s summer and while many of us will be hitting the beaches or heading for theme parks and road trips and other adventures, there’s a significant amount of work happening at my house. There will be a vacation, the first in two years, but that’s way at the end of the summer. Until then, like Robert Frost in his “Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening” poem, I have miles to go before I sleep. Job 1 for right now is the countdown to launching my son to Air Force Basic training in San Antonio. In August. Because you know, it’s lovely marching around the parade grounds in the hot Texas sun, while being serenaded by a drill instructor who seems homicidal, manic or perhaps just hangry. At least from the YouTube videos I’ve seen. Note to self: stop watching basic training videos on YouTube.

Unlike shopping for cute matching dorm pillows and shower caddies, getting a kid to basic isn’t really about how much stuff there is to buy. It’s actually more about paperwork (in triplicate), organization, and consuming enough Chardonnay to quell the rising panic. I’m really only good at one of those things. George will leave home with one small backpack and a manila folder. He likely won’t return again until the spring, if he’s lucky, has time and all heck doesn’t break loose (again) in this dangerous world. So, his room will be empty and I will be making a land grab and claiming it for my own. There will always be a bed for him, no matter what, but in the meantime, that bed is going to be have a fluffy quilt and there will be lots of beach art on walls repainted in a soft shade of green that should be called “Mermaid’s Butt” but is actually “Sea foam Serenade.” Now it just needs cleaning out.

The bookshelf is what’s happening this week. I was once dubbed “The Meanest Mother in the Universe” for saying no to some toy in the store, but there was pretty much never an occasion when I said no to a book. Many of them will be kept, but most have to go. While my oldest was a reluctant reader, he did like the Captain Underpants books and while I’m grateful to Dav Pilkey for writing something that would engage a kid like him, I no longer need the entire boxed set.  Nor do I need any of the Magic Tree House books, anything where a nerdy aardvark and his friends whine about school, or any moral lectures from that obnoxious holier-than-thou bear family that had all the answers, but still couldn’t come up with better names for their kids than “Brother” and “Sister.”

Nothing is worse than “Rainbow Fish” however, in which the lesson is that if you have different colored skin, or scales, as fish have, you will be bullied incessantly over it. The bullying will only stop when you physically peel off some of these shiny scales (which are body parts for fish!) and hand them out so the rainbow is re-distributed to everyone and no one can then be unique or different. Since I’m the only writer/author and English major in the house, I get to decide which books go and which get to stay. First, let’s begin with “Corduroy” by Don Freeman. That book stays with me until someone pries it from my cold, dead hand. The same goes for everything by Robert McCloskey. It’s possible I would run back into a burning building for my copy of “Make Way For Ducklings” because it was mine growing up and has an inscription from my father.

Finally there are the books about everyone’s favorite SOB (Silly Old Bear). A. A. Milne understood childhood better than any writer I’ve ever read. If it were possible, Pooh Corner and all the inhabitants would be real and I’d live there. What’s not to like? A an overanxious rabbit who talks too much, a stuttering pig that is clingy, an overweight bear who is never fat-shamed, a tiger who can't spell and routinely knocks people over bouncing around on them, a kangaroo single mom who hovers too much, but is still sweet and a clinically depressed donkey who has friends that love him and include him in their lives, even if he is sad and anti-social at times. These are characters that carried me through the toddler times, the teen angst and so much more. I’m different now, so is George, and that is exactly how it should be. Pooh, Corduroy, Mr. and Mrs. Mallard and a few other treasured friends, however, will be what they have always been: a window to the wonderland that books can be for a child of any age.