It's the 40th anniversary of Eric Carle's book "The Very Hungry Caterpillar."
In preschool, I loved poking my fingers through the pages. These holes transform the book from a mere vehicle for words and pictures, into an object that has its own part to play in the telling of the story. I still love books that do that.
In Infants school I enjoyed the counting: "On Monday, he ate through one apple...On Tuesday, he ate through two pears." I got more and more anxious with every bite and by Saturday's excesses my head was spinning. His subsequent stomachache appealed to my juvenile sense of justice.
To this day I feel cleansed and relieved when I hear (or read) the words "nice green leaf."
When at primary school I read the book to my younger siblings, I was fascinated by the metamorphosis (though still confused by the science). How could a big, dense, mostly monochromatic caterpillar become so fabulously coloured and so ethereal? How did it learn to fly if it was cooped up for two weeks with no wriggle room? And what would coccoon taste like if one had grown accustomed to cherry pie?
In high school, I read it aloud when babysitting, and found myself inwardly critical of the narrative. One apple, I calculated disapprovingly, was certainly as filling as four strawberries. And "gherkin" rather than "pickle" would seem to the be right term in Australia. And I simply could not see a caterpillar tucking into highly processed food - salami indeed! And surely caterpillars were vegetarian!
There was a lull while I was pretending to read Chomsky and Plato and Freud, and actually reading Bill Bryson and Maeve Binchy. Either way, it was a long time before I even picked up an illustrated book.
And then my own children were born and Caterpillar came back into my life.
You transcend the text when you read the same book every night for fifteen months. "Read" isn't even the right word when you recite it without looking, so often that the words have been scrubbed of all meaning. Fast and slow. Quiet and loud. With and without expression. Uncoupled from the right pictures. Repeated twice or three times. With variations (nope, no variations permitted). Before, during and after kids had finally fallen asleep.
For the first time, I looked - really looked - at the pictures. The varied brushstrokes and hues that make up Caterpillar's body. The ripped-paper browns and scissor-angled fruits that remind the viewer that it's collage. The expression of mild trepidation on Caterpillar's face just before he undergoes his metaporphosis - how do you
do that with cut out bits of paper?!?
And decades later, I find myself marvelling at this book all over again.
