AP Photo/Mary Altaffer
I’ll be the first to admit it, I was a boring kid. I mean really boring. Boring as in: I liked vanilla ice cream, my favorite color was pink, and my go-to bed time book was Goodnight Moon.
What can I say? With three older siblings willing to inflict pain and laugh in my face at any moment, boring definitely seemed like the way to go.
Yet, as I sit here at my desk – an older and wiser 20-something – I can’t help but wish I had been a cooler kid. Edgier, even. I should have liked carmel-chocolate-chip-cookie-dough-brownie-explosion ice cream. My favorite color should have been aquamarine with glitter. And perhaps, most importantly, my regular night time story should have been Where the Wild Things Are.
Maurice Sendak, widely considered to be the most important children’s book artist of the 20th century, passed away this morning at the age of 83 – leaving all the world for one final, ultimate rumpus. As Margalit Fox wrote in his New York Times obituary, he was the first to “wrench the picture book out of the safe, sanitized world of the nursery and plunge it into the dark, terrifying and hauntingly beautiful recesses of the human psyche.” (click here to read the entire obituary). In Sendak’s books, kids can be nice or nasty, says Jeanne Sager at The Stir. “They can be greedy or graceful. They can be scared. They can be forced to think. They are real kids living in a world devoid of the purple cats and talking unicorns” that inhabit other children’s books. He took kids (and their parents) to “that place deep down inside them, beyond the giggles and scraped knees…where they think thoughts you cannot hear, fear things you cannot see.”
In other words, he was anything but boring. He took his lifetime and filled it with imagination– writing over twenty books (including Where the Wild Things Are, In the Night Kitchen and Outside Over There) and illustrating countless others. And while I might be a little late to the party, you’re never too old to be inspired, right?
Here’s to you Maurice—I hope wherever you are, you’re making all kinds of mischief.