First Impressions

As a callow youth, writing now as an as-yet-uncallowed adult, Your Humble Correspondent was an avid reader. Descriptions of my voracity may strain my veracity, but my capacity for loquacity defines tenacity. Sadly, my tastes were largely dictated by others: which books my parents would buy me, which books the local library would lend me, or anything I was assigned to read in school. Once a year, though, the fetters of my literary limitations were loosened, allowing me to plunge headlong into the seemingly limitless depths of the Scholastic Book Fair catalog. No longer was I subject to the well-intentioned attempts of my parents to appease my literary appetite with the meager fare afforded by the local Book Nook. No longer was I stung by the arched eyebrow of the librarian, her Midwest Nice strained to its fraying limits asking me if my selections were "really at the right level". No longer was I forced to consume the same tired pablum doled out by the same tired teachers between furtive drags in the lounge. Finally, freedom was mine, and I welcomed it with the breathless excitement most children that age reserve for making friends. Fearing neither budget nor paper cut, I tore through the pages of the catalog like a boy possessed. Every book's summary was memorized, dissected, then debated with the grave attention of a Talmudic scholar. Puzzle books were for babies, Matt Christopher for the kids whose dads yelled at them at soccer practice, and anything about horses was dismissed out of hand.

One fateful year my teacher, a delightful septuagenarian nearing the well-deserved retirement that a year teaching Your Humble Correspondent had only hastened, was casting her rheumy eye over the hundred or so books under my careful consideration. After a pointed comment to the effect that perhaps marking the books I -didn't- want may have saved me an entire pencil, which I still believe was beneath her dignity, she seized upon one of my choices. "Ah, Bunnicula," she wheezed at me, "you'll love Bunnicula". Only my near limitless reserve of tact and reserve kept me from sneering at her, insofar as a fourth-grader can be said to sneer. I had included the silly book about scary bunnies as a sacrificial lamb, hoping it would draw one of my parents' peremptory strikes and thereby free up something meatier. I had my eye on a few high value volumes from the Newbery Award section -- I wasn't about to waste my valuable Scholastic budget on a silly book about scary bunnies when there were Book-It stars to be earned.

Then, as now, however, Your Humble Correspondent possesses a yielding, conciliatory nature – always too ready to set aside his own happiness to accommodate that of others. After a lengthy negotiation with my parents, in which I managed to inveigle them to spring for not one but two from the Newbery section while only having given up future allowance considerations and a third-round pet to be named later, I found that this absurd little scribble about scary bunnies had made the list. This was, I reflected, a boon granted to the doddering old sweetheart I had ushered into the sunset of her career, an act of largesse toward one whose tenure I was ending. What is it to me but a sop, a mere bagatelle, to humor the old broad?

Agonizing days – weeks! months! – later, the book fair arrived, the battered Scholastic panel van rumbling into the school parking lot like a band's tour bus arriving to an adoring crowd of one. Class by class, indifferent teachers herded their sullen students to the multipurpose room, through the newly-erected labyrinth of portable metal bookshelves, finally to the surly Scholastic minotaur directing us to our pre-orders. Groaning Scholastic roadies helped load my battered book bag with the bounty of books, my scrawny shoulders straining at the straps. Thusly burdened like a bookish Atlas, I couldn't wait to get home, to rush through my homework, to bolt my mother's painstakingly prepared dinner, to tackle my chores with even less attention than usual, finally to immerse myself in the wild worlds that awaited me.

Weeks later, my bemused parents were startled, even alarmed, at the peals of uncontrollable laughter emanating from Your Humble Correspondent as he read, then reread, then re-reread, Bunnicula, the silly book about scary bunnies. I had plowed through the prestige books, feasted on the pepperoni-topped spoils of a Personal Pan Pizza, and basked in the adoration and envy of my awed classmates as I dropped chapter after chapter in my insufferably arch book reports. Nearly forgotten behind the stacks of KidLit Cred was a too-slim volume bound in an already-dated Harvest Gold. Wallowing in a post-Pan-Pizza pool of triumphant apathy, I languidly picked up Bunnicula, attempted another sneer at the array of childish animals arrayed on the cover, and reluctantly started in on what was doubtless a waste of perfectly good reading time before lights-out.

I had enjoyed reading for as long as I remember. I loved a story, I loved getting to know a character, I loved exploring the worlds that had been built for me, I loved how an author could evoke so many moods. What I had never experienced was the simple joy of words making me laugh out loud, of pure unabashed silliness, of dizzying wordplay, of obsidian-sharp wit at which I would laugh in pure awe and appreciation that someone would share this with me. This silly book about scary bunnies had me doubled over, book on the floor, lost in the moment. I had never experienced anything like it.

As stated, callowness was in abundance. As a result, lost on me among the gags, the absurdity, the sheer delight of that book and what it revealed to me was a passing reference to the namesake of one of the main characters. In what will hopefully be one of the few posts carrying over its premise to its consequent, I hope to regale you, Loyal Readers, with why this matters and how that should establish the motive for this doubtless ill-advised exercise of ego and allow me to move on to assembling mountains out of molehills.