In the great green room
There was a telephone
And a red balloon
And a picture of-
The cow jumping over the moon.

One resolution I made for this new year is to read more children's books. Well, it may be my only resolution, as it may be the only one I can keep. You'll find me awkwardly sitting in the children's chairs in Barnes and Nobles, reading books long on pictures and short on words. On second thought, maybe not.

If we believe ourselves above children's books, then we are mistaken. Like God condescended to us, so we should condescend to children and, becoming like them, know what they know, which is that everything is fascinating, everything matters. The best children's books are written by authors who do just this. They write true, adult stories using child-size words, writing not for children but for themselves and, indirectly, for others similarly situated. When I grow up, I want to be just like those writers, with a child-like wonder and few yet musical words.

Take the author of Babar, Laurent de Brunhoff. At 92, having just completed his final book in the series, the first of which he authored and illustrated in 1945, de Brunhoff is well beyond childhood, yet he has a continuing child-like fascination with the elephant. That's nearly 92 years of loving the elephant, of being enraptured by its long trunk and big ears.

"I like to make the elephant alive," said de Brunhoff to a recent interviewer. "The elephant is a very appealing animal with its big ears and trunk, even when it is not dressed up like a human." De Brunhoff understates his love: he has been writing and drawing elephants since 1945, infected by a elephantine passion nurtured by his own father, who wrote the first Babar book in 1931, and who died when he was only 12. De Brunhoff is not trying to relate to children, to speak down to them, but is addressing his love of elephants to them much as he would to adults, only with less and simpler words. "I never really think of children when I do my books," says de Brunhoff. "Babar was my friend and I invented stories with him, not with kids in the corner of my mind. I write it for myself."

And who wouldn't love Babar? Who wouldn't want to ride a department-store elevator up and down with a kind and affable elephant? And what elephant wouldn't want to live in the city, with its relative safety, rather than in the far more dangerous realm of the jungle, where a hunter may shoot you? Who wouldn't want Babar for a friend?

Margaret Wise Brown, author of the classics Goodnight Moon and The Runaway Bunny, wrote her books out of her own love of nature, a love nurtured by time spent among the giant live oaks, high dunes, and sea grass of Cumberland Island, Georgia. She could not help but make up stories about the wildlife she observed there. "In the great green room" of nature, everything fascinated her. Everything had a story.

Whenever I have read the simple lines of Goodnight Moon, I have been comforted by the pleasing cadence, the sense of security conveyed by the particular, familiar things in the child's room, and the presence of the grandmotherly bunny waiting for the child to sleep. It is the look and sound of home. Read it slowly. Take note of every object in the room, pointing at and touching them. Better yet, read it to a child again and again. In Goodnight Moon particular things matter immensely, things we pass over in everyday adult life, things like "two little kittens, and a pair of mittens, and a little toy house, and a young mouse, and a comb and a brush and a bowl full of mush." Well, just everything, really, given more life in the dim light of night.

Yet another book, I Love You Forever, while ostensibly for children, deals with the weighty topics of familial love and mortality. In it, over the recurring chorus of "I love you forever, I like you for always, as long as I'm living my baby you'll be," the child grows and the parents age until, near the end of life, the child becomes the parent in a sense, the caregiver, and sings, "I'll love you forever, I'll like you for always, as long as I'm living, my Mommy you'll be."

The author, Robert Munsch, wrote the book after he and his wife had two still born babies. "For a long time I had it in my head and I couldn’t even sing it," says Munsch, "because every time I tried to sing it I cried. It was very strange having a song in my head that I couldn’t sing." You can't read I Love You Forever without a tear dropped or held, of course, but whatever tears you have wash up on the shores of deep, abiding, family love. Most children will laugh at the funny parts and be mystified or indifferent to the sadnesses that linger there; others, old souls in young bodies, may entreat you, as one did me, to "never, ever read or mention that story to me again" - which means it was good, I think.

But that's enough of resolutions. It's late, and my book awaits. So. . .

Goodnight stars
Goodnight air
Goodnight noises everywhere

Goodnight nobody.