Books like Horton Hears a Who!

In the fifties, my Mom was head librarian for our small-town library (politically, we were termed a Police Village, whatever that meant). So we kids got our literacy skills off and running when she used to catalogue books in our kitchen. Especially since City View was in the middle of the postwar Baby Boom - like everywhere else back then - which required her little library to be stocked with piles and piles of kids' books!And we were the first kids in our village of snug postwar bungalows to read Dr. Seuss. We laughed. We howled. We ROARED in delight!Horton Hears a Who was SO much better than our puny one-channel B&W TV with 7 hours of dull community programming - anyday! The early 1950‘s in backwater Canada were tough - the postwar recovery was going to take a while - but kids back then learned to VALUE their friends and family.I had a very good friend named Norman back in those days. Norman couldn‘t play ball or run with us - he had a defective heart.We all knew he didn‘t have much time to live.But Norman was the only friend I had who could talk about the serious things in life, and I had a very serious side, too, even back then.So we would talk about life and death. The Bomb. Our parents. The facts of life. Death itself.Serious, deep stuff that our prefab, one-size-fits-all society now rushes through in its plastic, clinical and brutal attempts to mature us.And how lucky we were - we didn’t live in a world of socially engineered mental hygiene back then. We were free!And the way we felt at the end of a long summer’s day was much like the warm feeling we get now after reading a very good book. A sense of being close to our roots and to our Creator...In our books we can find serious, non-conforming friends - just like my late friend Norman! People unafraid of the truth. And in books we can live in those simpler, unsupervised, unwatched times like he and I knew, all over again, if we like.It’s all in our books.Today my wife and I don't even have cable TV - only books. We learned something valuable from those years.Like, for instance, HORTON’s gentle philosophy. “An elephant’s faithful - one hundred percent!”Doesn’t get any better than that!Horton’s still in print. Theodore Geisel’s uncensored compassion lives on. Life is good.And you know what? The Big-Hearted elephant with Ears of a matching size (ears so acute and friendly they can detect a whole beleaguered Microdot Civilisation of Who's) still delights us and the little kids around us who may be hearing his story for the very first time.And still as comforting as ever, is the analogy of this Big Guy up there somewhere - as caring and compassionate as Horton or Norman - inclining his ear to the plight of a beleaguered world like ours and PROMISING that we will not stomped out by a new Rampaging Elephant.And so, these days, I always repeat Horton’s words to my wife:I meant what I said, & I said what I meant -An Elephant's faithful ONE HUNDRED PER CENT!