Pity them, these experts so lacking in the happiness of innocent imagination. You know their secret, but they know nothing of the joys a child holds in their heart. Teach your children who these experts are, and why they’re sad. But most importantly of all, teach them of your joys — and share with them those things that can never be taken.

I don’t remember much from kindergarten. We lived on Tobey Road in Belmont, Massachusetts, a little town next to Cambridge and just a mile from Boston, in an old house my parents, Uncle John, and their friends had spent months renovating. My mother had grown up here and we knew good people who would help out on the weekend for cold beer, subs, and a project.

I remember our dog Cullen, a young Irish Setter, chasing our school bus all the way to Winn Brook Elementary School. I didn’t see him and he didn’t manage to find me before I shuffled indoors, but he passed the morning playfully knocking toddlers over in Joey’s Park until my mortified mother got a phone call to please pick up her pup.

I remember not long before, my dad had volunteered to help build Joey’s Park, the sprawling and beautiful school playground designed by the children who missed Joey O’Donnell, a little Winn Brook boy who lost his battle with Cystic Fibrosis. If I’d been looking the day Cullen went on an adventure, I’d have seen him jumping up and sniffing every terrified little kid’s face until he found his kid, and sometimes my imagination pretends I did watch the chaos, giggling on my tip-toes in the second-story classroom window.

I remember we were studying Dr. Seuss when the teacher came in and told us he had passed away. I don’t remember any tears; we were children, and I was surprised to learn Dr. Seuss had been a living man like dad or my Papa just the day before. I had always assumed men as big as he — whose influence seemed everywhere in life — were men from a different age than mine, and couldn’t imagine having shared five years of my own lifetime with the Dr. Seuss whose drawings were on my classroom’s walls and whose lonely, animated mountaintop villain had tried to steal the Whos’ Christmas when my mother was still just a little girl.

I remember I was surprised, and I also remember that classroom at that exact moment. We were sitting cross-legged on the floor, the windows looking down on the playground on our right, the little area where I’d get in trouble for deconstructing cardboard building bricks to build robots just behind my teachers, and the door to the hall, left of that.

In the years that followed, Dr. Seuss stuck around. From “The Cat in the Hat” to Cindy-Lou Who, who was no more than two, and the Grinch himself, whose place in our hearts couldn’t even be stolen by Jim Carey. When I left home for the last time after graduating college, my neighbor Courtney gave me a copy of “Oh, The Places You’ll Go!” with a written inscription wishing me luck on my way.

Massachusetts is a special place for the stories we learned when we were young. Louisa May Alcott based “Little Women” on growing up in a brown Concord home a short walk from where my family lived when I was in third grade. In Boston Public Gardens, you can see the little bronze sculptures of eight baby ducklings following their mother, a tribute to Robert McCloskey’s 1941 classic “Make Way For Ducklings.” The men who hunted Moby Dick set sail from New Bedford.

I look forward to the day I have children of my own, but whether it’s an Ed Emberley book on how to draw a haunted house, my mother’s cookie recipes, or the bittersweet story of Mike Mulligan and his heroic steam shovel, at my rare sentimental moments I like to share the memories of childhood with the children of my friends.

Read More