The Nightly News Being a Part of the Child

I want to write a children’s story like Shel Silverstein. It’s going to be about a little boy, playgrounds and kickball, old cartoons centered around too much violence like Acme anvils and seeing stars.

There’s a biography I read when I was a kid about a man who died violently by his own hands. It happened to be Ernest Hemingway.

“What does suicide mean?”

“Where did you hear that?”

“A biography on a book.”

“It’s when someone has hurt themselves.”

The story could be about finding Old Man and the Sea at the school library and reading the back cover. It could be about parent-teacher conferences and the etymology of it, of the word suicide, and those things that Dad spoke about in passing while grabbing his coffee for work.

I was going to write a children’s book, but then I remembered 1986 when the Challenger space shuttle blew up on the TV monitor in 1st grade and how that made the teacher cry, the way I wanted to be an astronaut before that happened.

I want to write a children’s book like the Giving Tree by Shel Silverstein. I want people to know how simple life can be when it’s reduced to that, to caring. You could call it a parable or metaphor or anything really, but please don’t call it just a story.

I remember Tiananmen Square and the Chinese man standing in opposition to the tanks on the nightly news.

I want to write a children’s book because I want life to be worthwhile. And when I realize how wholesome children are to this messed up world, it would be about uncertainty, and I would give it a name.