Penguins and Pigs (Revisited)

A few weeks ago Isaac (my eleven year old) was reading aloud the book "Goodnight Opus" by Berkeley Breathed. It is a take-off of Margaret Wise Brown's children's book, "Goodnight Moon." The book begins with the penguin, Opus', grandmother trying to get him ready for bed:

"Which book, dear Opus, may I read you tonight?"
asked Grandma with love at the start of that night.
"Why, my favorite," I said, "the one with the rhymes,
the same one you've read me two hundred nine times."

And just as it is with all proper grannies,
she ordered me into my pink bunny jammies.
Then she sat and said, "Hush," and her voice filled the room.
"Goodnight," she read softly,
"goodnight to the moon..."

She continues reading, but then Opus gets an idea:

I can't really say how this happened next:
After two hundred ten times,
I departed the text...

"Goodnight," I yelled, jumping, "goodnight far away.
Goodnight to you all in my Milky Way!"

Opus' grandmother then scoldes him, and says:

"When your sight surpasses what's plainly in view,
pull your head from the clouds, keep the ground to your shoes.

"Now let's finish the story with no Milky Way.
It's improper that folks get so carried away."

Luckily for Opus, and us, his grandmother drifts off to sleep. He decides to continue the story, departing the text and wishing the Milky Way goodnight by going there himself to "wish it right to their kissers!"

He signs up the monster under his bed and a pillow with a balloon for a head to go on his journey with him. On their way, they encounter the Tooth Fairy sitting on mountains of old teeth, almost collide with a passenger plane, and skinny dip in the reflection pool at the Lincoln Memorial with Abraham Lincoln, himself (the statue).

I love the book, for many reasons, but the whole point of me telling this is because of Isaac's reaction to it. He accepted the Tooth Fairy trying to sell "an old Elvis molar," and the statue of a dead president stripping down to his union suit without batting an eye, but the next page gave him pause:

We flew past the sailors of Blue Mist Lagoon,
where for ten thousand years they've fished for the moon.
They've seen it up there and they just want to hook it.
They dream that one day they might baste it and cook it.

In the illustration, some of the sailboats are in the water, and others are floating up into the air. For whatever reason, Isaac just could not wrap his brain around that page. I guess a funny looking penguin using a bicycle to fly to the Milky Way makes sense, but flying boats don't.

It reminded me of when I was a little older than him, maybe 12 or 13. "The Muppet Show" was a favorite of mine, and I loved Miss Piggy. I remember reading an interview of Miss Piggy in a magazine and it was just so confusing to me! Miss Piggy was asked questions and she answered them in the self-centered, egotistical way that only Miss Piggy can, but it didn't make sense to me. She was only a puppet, how could she possibly answer what her favorite food was, or what she did in her down time? She wasn't real, so did the answers apply to the Muppeteer? I don't know if I'm explaining it very well. I knew she wasn't real, so how could she be the one answering the questions? It completely boggled my mind. When I thought about that with Isaac, it made me realize how literal I was, even back then.

Because I'm so literal, sometimes it's difficult for me to see a bigger picture, I tend to focus on the details, or even "the text." In some ways that's really good, but it can also limit my view and make me fearful. I'm working on seeing the big picture and looking into the future, realizing that even when I'm doing things right, I might not get the expected result right then. There are always things that you don't expect and maybe can't even understand at the moment, like flying sailboats and talking pigs. I've been holding on to false ideas and fears for far too long. In the words of Opus:

I told [Granny] all of what happened that night --
that I stepped out for once and followed my sight.
And that sometimes it's good that we look for a way
to depart from our text and get carried away.