Shelf-Life #7: Did I Ever Tell You How Lucky You Are?
This post is part of my weekly series, Shelf-Life. Each episode is about a particular book on my bookshelves. For more information see my introductory post. To read other episodes in this series, see the Shelf-Life Index page.
What is the first book you remember? Pressed to answer this question, eyes traversing the tall silhouettes, pillars of the shelves in my office, thoughts spelunking into the increasingly shadowy regions of my early memory, I’d have to say that the first book I remember is Dr. Seuss’s Did I Ever Tell You How Lucky You Are? The book was published in 1973 when I was just a year old, but its warm, yellow cover, red-lettered title, and mustachioed guru perched upon a cactus are as familiar to me today as anything, and while this certainly isn’t the first book that was read to me, it is the one that stands out in my consciousness as the first I remember. It is no coincidence, therefore, that it was and remains to this day, my favorite of Dr. Seuss’s books.
My dad read me Dr. Seuss books before I could read on my own. My earliest literary memory is that of the poetic rhythms of Dr. Seuss, spoken with my dad’s unique inflections, many of which I retained when reading these books to my own kids when they were young. If we didn’t go through the entire Seuss oeuvre, we missed only a few. And though I couldn’t yet read when these stories were read to me, I could and did memorize them. Family lore has it (and personal memory recalls) reciting one of Dr. Seuss’s stories, “What Was I Scared Of?1” to any available audience. I’m not sure why this was considered impressive: hear a story read aloud enough times and one can’t help but memorize them. But there I was standing before various adults, volubly reciting from memory (even now as I type this):
Well… I was walking in the nightAnd I saw nothing scary.
For I have never been afraid
Of anything. Not very.
I loved listening to my dad read these books to me. He read them all, over and over again. The ones that stand out are books like The Lorax and Happy Birthday To You! and Scrambled Eggs Super! (de-duper-de-booper, special deluxe, a la Peter T. Hooper). But I also recall enjoying books like Thidwick, The Big-Hearted Moose, Horton Hears a Who, If I Ran the Zoo and On Beyond Zebra. At one point, I probably had all these books memorized, and I was greatly relieved when I finally learned to read and realized I didn’t need to rely on my memory any longer to enjoy the books.
And yet, half a century later, I still know “What Was I Scared Of?” by heart. I still know The Lorax by heart. And I can still recite, in its entirety, Did I Ever Tell You How Lucky You Are? from memory, including my dad’s subtle cadence, and a few of my own that I’ve added over the years.
But why is Did I Ever Tell You How Lucky You Are? my favorite? For those unfamiliar with the book, it tells the story of Duckie who meets a wise man in a desert who tells him:
When you think things are bad,When you feel sour and blue,
When you start to get mad…
You should do what I do!
Just tell yourself, Duckie,
You’re really quite lucky!
Some people are much more…
Oh, ever so much more…
Oh, muchly much-much more
Unlucky than you!
Our host then parades Duckie past a score of people in increasingly unfortunate and unenviable situations. In one such situation, Duckie is posed with the dilemma of living in the city of Ga-Zair. There is a picture of the Seussian city spread across two pages, and I can still see my dad pointing to the top left corner of the left page, and reading, “With your bedroom up here…” and then tracing the elaborate and precarious staircases through the city to the top right of the right page, and continuing, “…and your bathroom up there.”
My bathroom was just a few steps down the hallway from my bedroom and I distinctly recall being suddenly grateful for this fact.
If you look closely at the photo of the book above, you’ll see that “Seuss” is not far from “Shakespeare” on my shelves. Both wrote in verse, and both wrote about human nature. But I encountered Dr. Seuss before William Shakespeare, and while there is much about Shakespeare that I admire, my heart is with Dr. Seuss.
For as long as I can recall, I’ve always felt the need to draw practical lessons from reading. I read for the entertainment, and to learn new things, but regardless of what I am reading, I am always on the lookout for the practical lessons. Not only that, I try to apply those lessons to my life. It may very well be that I drew my first practical lessons from Did I Ever Tell You How Lucky You Are?.
I drew from this book my first awareness of the rhythm of language. I’d heard songs on the radio, of course, and there were other books written in rhyme. But it was with this book that I first realized that music wasn’t necessary for rhythm, that words, well written, could have a rhythm all their own. There was a playfulness to the rhythms that I don’t recall from other books. Part of that might have been due to the way my dad read the book, but even that was a lesson: there was a rhythm to language beyond the page, it was something that the reader brought to the mix.
It was also not hard for me to imagine how much more difficult life might be if I didn’t have a conveniently located bathroom. Over time, this morphed into a mental reminder to myself that as bad as things might seem, there are those who have it far worse than I do.This learned lesson is no more clear to me than in 29 years of diaries. Scattered through those years are dozens of entries that seem to take a pause from the day-to-day hustle and bustle to review where life has taken me, and how lucky I have been. Or, on the flip side, when something has gone badly, to try to find the good that comes from it, and remind myself that some people are much more, oh, ever so much more, muchly much-much more unlucky than me.
The story appears in The Sneetches and Other Stories . For the longest time, I thought the story was called “The Pale Green Pants” because, well, a pair of pale green pants is one of the two characters in the story.
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