closet play

“Oh please don’t go - we’ll eat you up - we love you so!”

It was with enormous sadness that I read today of Maurice Sendak’s death.  This man’s magnificent imagination gave birth to a story so wonderful as to leave an indelible mark on my nascent sense of self-identity.

Where The Wild Things Are was read to me at an age so young I cannot recall not knowing this book, the memory of my mother’s voice (she told a terrific story) giving life to the prose remains large and vivid. Those few pages offer crystalline so much of what childhood is. The fears and frustrations of a puzzling world that all too often seems set at odds with the wants and desires of a child and the escapism that’s found in the exploration of your own mind’s landscape.  A children’s book that speaks to children on their own level.

It’s not easy to say whether art like this made me who I am or who I am craves art like this. Suffice to say I think the same kids that revel in the shadows of Sendak’s illustrations are the same adults that see more romance in There Is A Light That Never Goes Out than any Celine Dion ballad, or are moved more by a Bacon painting than a Constable landscape. Solace sought in dark places. I understand that WTWTA was subject to criticism at the time of its publication, deemed too sinister for a children’s picture book.  Childhood can be terrifying at times, no book can measure up to that, Sendak knew it.

I’ve read this book to my little brothers, I’ll read it to my newest little brother, I’ll read it to my own children and I’ll read it to any grandchildren that may appear, for I am forever down for a Wild Rumpus. Thank you so very, very much Maurice Sendak.