Little Golden Books and other things

The world is now a strange and terrifying place where a myriad of things compete for our interest on a daily basis. I read a statistic in Harper's that the average worker gets distracted once every fifteen minutes and it takes them, on average, twenty minutes to get back to the fugue state of accomplishing solid work. Like most people over the age of thirty I blame the internet. Who could have known that it would turn into this universe of its own? A universe comprised of inanity and incredible depth. A place where you can go to learn about the history of gnosticism, and have, after a half an hour or so, a basic grasp of its tenets, or you could read an article about 21 ways to make him hot. No. 18 Leave him alone sometimes. The point is that the degree of choice that we have on the Internet is kind of astounding. We are always literally seconds from abasing or edifying ourselves.

Which of course brings me to the eighth best-selling book of all-time "Scuffy the Tugboat." I f-ing (word not used at age three) loved Scuffy when I was growing up. Who wouldn't? Scuffy is a story about a little boat who desires to leave the bathtub where he floats around in the company of a little boy. The boy's father, perhaps single in this story? very progressive is a toy store owner and is identified as the man in the polka dot tie (Why are men in these stories all described as wearing yellow hats or polka dot ties? Why can't it just be Jack, the toy store owner? I suppose by calling him the man you're giving him a bit more of an archetypal feel. Though one could argue that this book, written in 1946 is clearly speaking to the marginalization of the worker, not even given a name, but a job only, which lead to Marxism and the rise of McCarthyism. But that's only so that flagging English Departments can soldier on in this era of data).

Here is a nine minute movie about Scuffy that no one, myself included, will ever watch.
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Scuffy eventually gets out of the tub and out into the bright world, where he travels downstream seeing cows and small boats, and larger ships, until he almost reaches the sea. The reason this book is so amazing is because it shows you as a young child that the desire to grow up is a good and natural thing and that encountering the world at large is both scary and necessary. And though you're excited for Scuffy you're also secretly a bit scared about the world that he has entered, which you've avoided as well. And the reason that Scuffy is an absolute classic is that right before he enters the ocean, read adulthood, teens, first grade, whatever, the man in the polka dot tie and the boy pick him up and take him back to the tub where he lives happily ever after. Read: mom and dad will keep you safe. This book is pretty much amazing and nothing like that book "Ping," which as far as I can tell in retrospect is about racism against Chinese people and not eating ducks. Okay, thematically you could actually link it quite closely with Scuffy, but despite the fact that it's in its seventeenth printing I don't think it's as much of a classic, primarily due to the shoddy characterization of the Chinese duck keeper.

Here is something that everyone in the Internet has already seen.

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The reason that Scuffy is so relevant, and Ping to a lesser degree is that we find ourselves in that very situation now as adults. We are no longer children, but we have the freedom, read American wealth, to behave as if we are. We can enter into wonderlands that require nothing of us, we can retreat from the world and live out our days in the bathtub of our youth. And I can understand the impulse. The big wide ocean of the world can be a soul crushing kind of place, and it takes a hell of a lot effort to counter that childish impulse.

The good news for me of course is that we're about to have a child and I can pretty much resign from life and put all my failed hopes and dreams on a drooling infant. By that I mean I can read them Scuffy the Tugboat, and they will understand that it will always be safe at home.

Here is a brilliant essay about getting old and the fact that we can't take nature with us into that vast universe of the internet.
http://www.harpers.org/archive/2010/05/0082931

Note: I'd be interested in hearing of other classic favorites from people. Excluding, The Little Engine that Could, The Little Red Caboose, which as far as I can tell is the exact same story told about an engine and a caboose. Both classic. And the Runaway Bunny, which I, as a mama's boy loved, but turns out, according to my sister, to read as a sort of creepy and intrusive, read, classic overly involved Jewish mother, parenting book.