Dr Seuss Magic
“Isn’t it marvelous to leave such a legacy behind?” I asked sleepily. It was Dr Seuss’s birthday and typically marked as Read Across America week. I miss the fuss of the week in elementary schools. The middle schoolers and high schoolers get to have their fun, but we just get to hear about it a lot less, I guess.
Lazily, I picked up a book written by Dr Seuss, that has been lying around for ages in the children’s bookshelves and had never read before. The Bippolo Seed and Other Stories.
The stories, some of them at least, had predictable plot lines, but oh! How he presented them! I feel justified in the use of as many exclamation marks as necessary when writing about Dr Seuss. For instance, there is a story of a bear ready to pounce on a rabbit. The rabbit, doing some quick thinking, stalls the bear with an intriguing thought.
The Rabbit, the Bear, and the Zinniga-Zanniga
“I sure hate to tell you It isn’t too good. I was counting the eyelashes 'round your eyes, Your left eye…your right eye…and, to my surprise, They weren’t the same number! … “I’m sorry…SO sorry. But, sir, it is true. Poor Bear! This is dreadful! One eyelash too few!”
In typical Dr Seuss fashion, the rabbit takes it to ridiculous extremes. Could the bear’s spine be cracking, could his brain be lopsided, all those aches and pains, oh it all makes sense. By the end of the tale, the bear is sitting atop a zinniga-zanniga tree with a flower pressed to his eye so that the extra eyelash can grow and make him feel whole again, while the rabbit skips on his way, free from the bear’s claws.
Oh!
I laughed so hard, I sputtered and sprayed my coffee, I put my phone in the refrigerator and looked for it all morning, and I almost walked straight into a zinniga-zanniga tree myself.
What a marvelous tale to encapsulate how our worries sometimes run away with our imagination, the hypochondriacs hidden in every one of us to a certain degree poking fun at itself, and the societal pressures on perfect eyelashes playing into the bear’s psyche?
Sometimes, we need entire tomes to discuss these themes, other times, a lost story of Dr Seuss would do.
Nourish-n-Cherish 