Forever Books

"The books we enjoy as children stay with us forever," writes Sid Fleischman.

How true!

My mother filled my childhood home with books, once spending so much money on them that she angered my father. And she read to my sisters and me, by day and before bedtime. She read our favorites over and over. 

We knew MOTHER GOOSE rhymes by the dozens:  "Dickory, dickory, dock" or "Rub a dub dub" or "Simple Simon met a pieman."

We graduated to Lewis Carroll's ALICE'S ADVENTURES IN WONDERLAND with its disappearing Cheshire cat, its argumentative Caterpillar with a hookah, and its Duchess who beat her little boy when he sneezed.

Add to that Irish folk tales by the dozens, plus SIBBY BOTHERBOX, and THE SECRET GARDEN, and FIVE LITTLE PEPPERS AND HOW THEY GREW, novels whose appealing characters and carefully crafted adventures gripped us.

But the book that stayed with us was A. A. Milne's WINNIE-THE-POOH. 

Christopher Robin didn't move us, nor Pooh or Piglet or Owl or Kanga and her baby Roo. 

The Old Grey Donkey, gloomy Eeyore, did. 

When he sighed and said things like "Pathetic. That's what it is. Pathetic" or  "Somebody must have taken my tail. How Like Them," we recognized him. 

He was our bleak, glum, melancholy mother, Zelma Theola Kemper Coffey.

We promptly dubbed her "Eeyore," a nickname that fit her even to the end of her life.   

Thirty-three years ago this month, when she was seventy-eight years old, my mother decided, Eeyore-like, that her weak-boned life—fall, break bones, hospital, therapy, home, fall—was no longer viable. 

She refused to eat, and on March 20, 1984, she died of starvation.