I Like You

by Sandol Stoddard Warbug
illustrated by Jacqueline Chwast
Houghton Mifflin 1965

My wife likes to say I have a sticky brain. This is a fairly accurate description of my proclivity to spout lots of useless bits of cultural flotsam that I can recall at a moment's notice. I can, for example, sing jingles from television commercials that haven't aired in over 35 years without the crutch of revisiting them on YouTube. I can, with the briefest of information, recall the actors or titles of movies as people try to describe them. I am horrible at the stuff I was supposed to learn in school, but I often get the obscure questions correct in Trivial Pursuit.

Years ago I came across a single panel cartoon -- reprinted in an issue of Utne magazine, if I'm not mistaken -- that made me laugh with a sort of recognition that could have sunk my spirits if it caught me on the wrong day. In it, a portly gentleman is among a handful of people in a movie theatre, staring at the screen in horror. The caption (approximately): "Roger suddenly realizes that one of his treasured childhood memories is actually a scene from a movie." I took this to be Roger Ebert, Pulitzer Prize winning movie critic, and I knew all too well how that felt. So many times as an adult, revisiting old movies I might only have caught a glimpse of on television growing up, I have scenes come rushing back like a sudden gale force wind. It is, indeed, an odd thing when a memory from childhood presents itself and demands recognition.

So for years I have been using the phrase "goofus on the roofus" as a term of endearment for those who have behaved silly. Certainly with my girls, though I have done it to friends as well. In my mind the full phrase was always "goofus on the roofus, hollering your head off" and, when the situation called for it, I would use the whole line. I cannot recall specifics, but I have no doubt I have referred to at least one individual in Berkeley (known by many as The Hate Man) precisely this way. Something to do with his daily ritual of standing on the roof of his apartment building, in full view of my dorm room, naked, shouting at the sun in some ritualistic fashion.

Recently, I dropped by my local children's book store and saw I Like You sitting on the counter. I'm not generally convinced that impulse items placed by the check-out counter are really deserving of the space, but there was something about this book that caused me to pick it up. It had that look about it that said "Remember me?" and so I had to find out whether it was, indeed, another treasured childhood memory coming back to claim it's rightful place. I used the time-honored tradition of the Random Page Test, and this is what I landed on:



"I am a goofus on the roofus
Hollering my head off
You are one too"
(sorry for the bad scan)

Another gap in my past bridged.

The 1960s seemed like a time when children's books were not only finding their legs, but really testing the boundaries of their freedom. Nonsense and imagination took the place of linear narrative in a way that seemed to reflect the restless nature of a post-war, baby boomer childhood. There are glimmers of this in Ruth Krauss's Open House for Butterflies and Remy Charlip's Arm in Arm, collections of prose-poems and story-etts and snippets of the kind of nonsense that resonates with a playground sensibility.

Warburg opens with the declarative "I like you / And I know why" and proceeds to explain all the reasons why. Many of the reasons are as intimate as being able to share secrets, or share feelings, and they aren't always positive. "I like you because if I am mad at you / Then you are mad at me too // It's awful when the other person isn't // Phooey." And the book continues with this examination of friendship until finally concluding, with the only true response to such a query, "I guess I just like you // Because I like you."

Chwast's illustrations have that loose, spontaneous quality of having quickly captured a moment, almost as if they were taken from a sketchbook. With each page the subjects change so that there is no particular individual serving as the "I" throughout; boys and girls, men and women, young and old, and all the various combinations, each used to help illustrate the quasi universal elements that build a friendship. I say quasi because, unfortunately, the book suffers that lack of diversity that would come a few years down the line in children's books. Everyone depicted is clearly of European descent (or an animal). I wish Chwast had been more forward thinking and given us just a bit of the old UN casting here. It would have gone a long way toward promoting not just the ideas of friendship, but that these things are universal across the spectrum and the sort of things that bring us together.

Still, it fills in yet another gap in my endless quest to rebuild the library of my youth and explain one of my more curious expression. I'll continue to call people goofuses on the roofuses when warranted, only now I'll know where it came from.

(For those reading comments, I don't normally go back and revise posts once "published" - I prefer to stand here warts and all - but this time the gaff Mr. Florian pointed out didn't sit well with me. I only mention it so the comment makes sense.)

The Perfect Day

by Remy Charlip
Greenwillow Press 2007

In very quiet rhymes Remy sets the scene.

Mountain
Valley
Rising sun
Time to wake
Day has begun

The sun is rising in the on the mountain while the night is still nestled in the valley. We move from the large to the small as a child and parent sit at breakfast and plot out their day. In luminous watercolor they move to a hike, gaze at the clouds, have lunch with friends, sing and play, sit under a quiet tree and take a nap.

The day moves on, the simple rhymes gently drifting like a breeze across the pages. They return home, paint pictures of their day, "read from picture books and think"...

And I stop cold. First, Charlip is suggesting that parents and children not only read picture books but that they think about them. Without disturbing the flow of the book he has included a very careful suggestion that picture books not just be read but considered, pondered, discussed. Then I look at the picture carefully and notice dozens of books open on the floor, all miniature watercolor spreads from Charlip's many books.

I so want to be wrong about this, but it feels like Remy Charlip is taking inventory and saying his good-byes.

I continue on. Tomorrow is another day, tomorrow we can laugh and play. I feel uneasy. The child is nestled into bed, the window above the bed filled with the mountain and valley from the beginning, the sun on the other side now signaling the end of the day, a passage into the night.

Mountain Valley Setting sun Time to sleep Night has begun

Remy Charlip finished this book before suffering his stroke in October of 2005 and as of a year ago was still undergoing physical therapy, the note above his work desk where the proofs for this book lay reading "Go slow. Do less." My hope is that it's coincidental he included his published history strewn on the floor of a painting for his latest book -- an inside joke -- and that he'll continue to perform his dances of quiet whimsy in picture book form.

In ruminating over the summary of this back back in January on his birthday I doubted the book was as simple as it's description:

A parent and child spend a perfect day together, from sunrise to nightfall.

Now, of course, I want to believe it is just that simple.

Remy Charlip

This is Remy.
He was born on this day in 1929. I met him when I was a boy, sometime around when he would have been 40 years old, around the age he was in this picture.

I don't fully remember the circumstances, the time or place, it's all part of the dreaminess of childhood. It was a large room, filled with kids, and this free-spirited man who must have come across like a whirlwind. Could it have been at the L.A. County Museum of Fine Art? Perhaps. The space had the large, open feeling of an empty gallery, but more finished and refined than a dance studio or performance space. There was music and singing and dancing, all of it very unconventional. Imaginary Dances, I believe he called them. We were kids, we didn't care what they were called, we just did our little interpretive wriggling and posturing and had a lot of fun.

He wrote and illustrated children's books as well. One of my favorites was a hodge podge collection of illustrated jokes, poems, puns, songs and other playful amalgamations of word and image. It was called Arm in Arm and is, occasionally, still available.

Another book of his that was a favorite is the kind of book that has seeped deeply into the subconscious of many people I have met. Strangely, while many are familiar with the book -- and the sort of word game it engenders between budding wordsmiths and their parents -- few can name it's author. Perhaps you are familiar with Fortunately.

Fortunately, Ned was invited to a surprise party.
Unfortunately, the party was a thousand miles away.
Fortunately, a friend loaned Ned an airplane.
Unfortunately, the motor exploded.
Fortunately, there was a parachute in the airplane.
Unfortunately, there was a hole in the parachute....

Once I got the rhythm of this in my head as a child I could never let it go. For the rest of my days, whenever I heard someone make a declarative statement beginning with either the word fortunately or unfortunately I would find myself (often in my own head, for my own amusement) countering with a humorous rejoinder. And I have heard the call and response of parent and child making up their own fortunately/unfortunately dialog so I know I'm not the only one.

He wrote and illustrated many other books. The circular playfulness of I Love You. The silhouetted gothic of Mother, Mother, I Feel Sick; Send for the Doctor, Quick, Quick, Quick. The gentle care in illustrating the lesson of Margaret Wise Brown's The Dead Bird. The anonymous beasty of Four Fur Feet. They endure because they reach into a vast well of understatement that promotes and celebrates the power and beauty of a child-like imagination. They bare the unmistakable mark of a poet choreographer whose fondness for sharing his exuberance with children was evident in all he did.

Remy suffered a stroke a few years back and has been slowly on the mend. Before the stroke he finished work on a children's book called A Perfect Day to be released in May of this year by HarperCollins. The summary of the book:

A parent and child spend a perfect day together, from sunrise to nightfall.

Though I'm sure it's an accurate summation, somehow I doubt it's as simple as all that.