Recently, I reorganized the books in my son’s room and playroom. I do this occasionally, so that we “refind” the books that have made their way to the bottom of the basket or back of the shelves. After I got everything straightened this time, he latched on to one particular book, and hasn’t let go. For nearly two weeks, we’ve read the exact same book every day before nap time and again before bed.
I have the thing memorized. But not because of the last two weeks.
The book we’ve been reading againandagainandagain is OH, WHAT A BUSY DAY! By Gyo Fujikawa. I know this book by heart because my own mother read it to me, at my insistence, day in and day out when I was little. In fact, she can still recite the book without looking at the text. There’s a companion book, COME FOLLOW ME, which I’ve set aside for my daughter, that my mother read just as often. She saved them both, for decades, unable to part with the books that were so important to me when I was small.
When I found out I was expecting my son, she patched up the covers and gave them to me, so that I could read them to my own kids. I was thrilled and touched and pleased to note that I still thought they were great books, almost thirty years after loving them for the first time.
What I didn’t expect was how happy I would be to see that my son loves “his” book just as much as I did. It thrills me to have him demand the same stories – even the same physical books! – that I did at his age. I know literature is timeless. Generations of girls have loved JANE EYRE. Dads have given their old HARDY BOYS mysteries to their sons. But handing down this one, not-so-well-known book and knowing that it may shape my own son’s first early-reading memories the way it shaped mine . . . this is a big part of what I love about books. How they link us together, not just through the universalities we find in plot and character, but through the shared experience of an actual book. Turning the same pages. Touching the same illustrations.
Who knows? Maybe someday my son will read the same book to his own child. It can be our own little literary legacy. Even if it is as simple as OH, WHAT A BUSY DAY!
Love this!!
Wow what an amazing story! That’s awesome that the book has travelled with you from childhood to motherhood.