
The Free Press

Welcome to “Things Worth Remembering,” in which writers share a poem or a paragraph that all of us should commit to heart. Today, in honor of Father’s Day, The Free Press’s very own Peter Savodnik shares his favorite poem to read to his daughter.
When I was 6, my father gave me Shel Silverstein’s poetry collection Where the Sidewalk Ends, and in the evenings, after I bathed and before I went to bed, we read poems on the sectional in our family room. When I think about these moments, I remember the smells: the books on the bookshelves, the residue of the aftershave my father had slapped on that morning, the hint of the Scotch he had had after dinner. And the sounds: my mother washing dishes in the kitchen or putting my sister to bed; a Chopin nocturne or Mozart concerto on the hi-fi.
So when my daughter, Josephine, was 6, I gave her the same collection. Published in 1974, it’s shot through with references to televisions and tree houses and jump ropes and kids who have chores, and it felt, by the second decade of this century, a tad dated. No matter. Like my father, I made a point of reading poems with her on our couch after her nightly bath and before she went to bed. Like me, she loves every last poem in there.
There was the poem about the dentist who gets eaten by his crocodile patient, and the one about the boy who picks his nose, and the one titled “Captain Hook” and the other titled “Hug O’ War,” and her favorite, the one we had to read every time, “Peanut-Butter Sandwich,” about the king who only eats peanut-butter sandwiches, and then there was my favorite, which was Josie’s second favorite, “Jimmy Jet and His TV Set,” which is about a boy who watches so much television that he turns into one. (This feels more and more like a premonition.) She would laugh uproariously as she read aloud:
And he grew a plug that looked like a tail
So we plugged in little Jim.
And now instead of him watching TV
We all sit around and watch him.
Silverstein’s poems, poetry aficionados insist, are not great poetry. I’m not a poetry aficionado, but I have read Ovid, Shakespeare, John Milton, William Wordsworth, and so on, and yes, I take their point. The greats offer profound insight, beauty, wisdom—all that.
I say: Whatever. Silverstein may not transform our understanding of death or the nature of being, but occasionally he tells us something lovely and maybe even poignant about the fears, hurts, pains, joys, and triumphs of the little people.
Is the dentist-eating crocodile really a bloodthirsty reptile? Or a stand-in for every kid facing down a dentist, with their medieval torture devices? Surely every child who has been tasked with taking out the garbage can relate to Sarah Cynthia Sylvia Stout, whose refusal to take the garbage out leads to her untimely death?
And what about “the long-haired boy,” whose crime against humanity is to upset deeply entrenched gender norms? (The poor kid would have been transitioned long ago in this day and age.) His ostracizing by polite society leaves him heaving, quaking:
Till his whole body shook,
And pretty soon his hair shook too,
And it flapped
And flapped—
Until he lifts off “like a helicopter,” escaping all the mean, small-minded adults out there. The people who have forgotten what it means not to adhere to the rules and regulations imposed on them by the adults who came before.
Much more important than any exegesis of Silverstein’s poetry is the experience of reading it. Silverstein is fun. He makes you laugh, and even guffaw, and there’s something unseemly about it all—“The Dirtiest Man in the World,” “Recipe for a Hippopotamus Sandwich,” and that crazy short poem about Melinda Mae, who spends her whole life eating a whale.
Silverstein offers us a window into the life of the child, and adults’ reactions to children, and children’s reaction to that. All the foibles and stupidities of the grown-ups: their unimaginativeness, their rush to judgement, all the things we acquire or become after having been immersed for several years in the gray, the serious, the pedestrian. Their disdain for little Hector the Collector, whose collection of dolls and nails and old chipped vases the adults call “junk.” Their inability to empathize with the older sibling who prefers not to have a baby sister. Their endless finger-waving, beautifully captured in the eight-line poem “Listen to the Mustn’ts.”
Silverstein may not transform our understanding of death or the nature of being, but occasionally he tells us something lovely and maybe even poignant about the fears, hurts, pains, joys, and triumphs of the little people.
To be a child laughing on a couch next to your father while reciting a poem about Melinda Mae, who takes 89 years to finish her meal—because “she took little bites and she chewed very slow / Just like a good girl should”—is to be in on the joke that is adulthood, to see through the self-importance, the hypocrisy. It is a glorious feeling, and that feeling—that’s the stuff I am constantly tunneling back in time in search of. Always trying to recall, to summon, to remind my daughter and, more recently, my son, that unlike the adults in Where the Sidewalk Ends, I have not forgotten what it means to be them, that I am the father my father was.
To me, it is “Jimmy Jet” that remains the greatest of the great—the acme of the Silverstein oeuvre. As I explained to Josie recently, “Jimmy Jet,” like so many Silverstein poems, is funny and weird and a little horrifying:
He watched till his eyes were frozen wide,
And his bottom grew into his chair.
And his chin turned into a tuning dial,
And antennae grew out of his hair.
But really: “Jimmy Jet” is about parents who have forgotten their God-given mandate, which is to protect and nourish their children. They have not only allowed their son to become the gadget we’re meant to fear and loathe—“his brains turned into TV tubes / And his face to a TV screen”—they are watching it (watching him), happily, lazily, TV Guide in hand! It’s unbelievable!
Or not. Apparently, many of our newest crop of parents, those in their 20s and 30s, are too busy or bored or lazy or dumb to read to their kids. They should all be stripped of their parental duties and sent to reeducation camps, where I’ll provide lectures on the joys of Milton . . . and Silverstein.
Because really really: “Jimmy Jet” is as much for adults as it is for children. It is a reminder to roll one’s eyes, to listen to the cautionary tale but not so much that you forget to break the rules, at least sometimes. This applies less to the young than to their fathers, because fathers are not simply fallible but often blind to their fallibility (unlike children, who are constantly being reminded of it).
I thought it was my responsibility when she came into the world to recreate for Josephine the world my father gave me. But that’s impossible and probably ill-advised. That is not how we teach children not to listen to the mustn’ts. We teach them that by reminding them that they are loved and that those who love them know something about some things and very little, if anything, about everything else. Which is why we read Shel Silverstein on the couch in the evening, between the rigmarole of the day that has just ended and the sleep that is about to come. To laugh, to unwind, to allow the many pressures and frustrations to ooze out of us. And to remember what it means to sit next to someone who means that much to us while knowing that even he—especially he—cannot know what lies ahead; that he can only give us a moral point of view and a thick skin and a road map for navigating the shoals of future, complicated waters.
“Things Worth Remembering” will be back in your inbox next Sunday. In case you missed it, last week Mijal Bitton reflected on the right to be different, a freedom that Jews have died for.