Small Packages

Baby anything is cuter than its adult version. A blanket statement, I know, but I’m really hard-pressed to think of an exception. Kittens, puppies, tadpoles, lambs--all more precious than the bigger model. Even double chins, chubby thighs, sparse hair and drool are adorable if the person sporting them is still what my grandparents would call knee-high to a grasshopper. Almost every creature seems to have a tender spot for new ones. This is probably nature’s way of keeping often annoying, frustratingly dependent beings from being eaten, I’ll wager. Baby things particularly register with me. Perhaps it’s from being a big sister, or growing up in a religious tradition where women are assigned value based exclusively on motherhood, or maybe even a natural immaturity, but whatever caused it did a bang-up job of making an impression. One of the most enduring pictures in my head of a cute baby thing is an early illustration in the paperback version of Charlotte’s Web where Fern is bottle-feeding a newborn, newly-rescued Wilbur and gazing at him adoringly. How could you not save such a ridiculously darling baby thing? I doubt her zeal would have been as…um…zealous if he had been a full-grown, tusk-wielding boar, but tiny piglet Wilbur is another story. In the Little Golden Book Classic Baby Farm Animals, each youngster is shown at its most endearing. I’m not much of an outdoor girl, but these illustrations make me want to at least visit a farm. Someday. If we don’t stay too long.

http://www.amazon.com/Baby-Animals-Little-Golden-Classic/dp/0307021750

http://www.randomhouse.com/golden/lgb/timeline.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garth_Williams

E-I-E-I-O

In my first year of college at Cal State Los Angeles, some kitchen mishap made our dorm apartment reek. As we opened the windows to get rid of the stench, I sputtered something about the smell being worse than a skunk. One of my roommates, a born and bred Angeleno, gasped back that she wouldn’t know because she had never smelled a skunk. Even having been metropolitan-born myself, I could not believe such a thing. Never smelled a skunk? Ever? To what do you compare all bad smells (other than Long Beach)? And then it got more bizarre: she’d never seen a cow either. My mind still reels all these years later. This young woman had reached pre-med student adulthood but had never been to a petting zoo, for heaven’s sake? How is this possible? My kids have been very fortunate that they have always had a local working farm and pumpkin patch to visit where they experience the animals, from newborn to retired, up close and personal. The farm shut down as a public entity this year, but I have twenty years worth of petting, feeding, and hay riding pictures as proof that I at least tried to broaden their suburban horizons. Annie North Bedford’s The Jolly Barnyard shows an idyllic picture of farm animals brainstorming what contributions they can make to the farmer’s birthday celebration. Maybe there’s some rich Southern California doctor that would pay for them to take their show on the road to the inner city.

http://www.amazon.com/Jolly-Barnyard-Little-Golden-Book/dp/0375828427

http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/585620.Annie_North_Bedford