If and when I grow up, I’d like to have the literary and artistic genius of Shel Silverstein, who in Where the Sidewalk Ends: The Poems and Drawings of Shel Silverstein, successfully brought out common childhood images and doodles and transformed them into poetry and arts that reach out to all.
I purchased a previously-owned 50th anniversary special edition of this masterpriece on e-bay for four dollars when I was building a fortress made of books in our little piece of home in Montana. I started reading the first few pages in the US but I found it too, uhm, weird. So I dumped it in the box to be sent to the Philippines when we moved here in June 2016.
I read it again just last month and I found it more entertaining than weird. My three-year-old daughter Antoinette, who is exhibiting interests in the arts, sleeps with this book. She calls it a “drawing book”. She likes the poem Spaghetti and asks me several questions on why Sarah Cynthia Sylvia Stout Would Not Take the Garbage Out.
What Silverstein did in this work is to write and draw snippets of our childhood that we ignored for quite some time. Reading the poems in the book opened long-standing stories stored at the back of my brain. He was able to tap into his childhood core and then a translate aspects of my childhood into bite-size pieces called memories.
This is not a typical children’s illustration book. I guess I will venture out to say that this is not even a book for children but a book for adults meant to bring them back or remember their childhood.
In The Giving Tree, Silverstein brought us the story of a tree who dearly loved a boy but the insensitive boy kept on taking her for guarantee until she was reduced to a stump.
In Where the Sidewalk Ends, Silverstein brought us to a more diverse world, crazy with endless possibilities and teeming with unicorns and board – and that makes this book worthy of a five-minute scan.
My personal favorites in the book includes If the World is Crazy and Where the Sidewalk Ends because they are realistic but written in a tone that evokes nostalgic and hopeful feelings.
Take these four lines from Where the Sidewalk Ends:
Yes we’ll wall with a walk that is measured and slow,
And we’ll go where the chalk-white arrows go,
For the children, they mark, and the children, they know
The place where the sidewalk ends.
The genius that is Shel Silverstein wrote songs, sang and played the guitar and drew cartoons. So… yes, when I grow up I want his literary and artistic genius.
Hey, a girl can dream right?
