My daughter's new favorite book is a pocket dictionary she pulled off the bookshelf the other day and stuck into her pile of bedtime books. She picks the pile every night, and I read the books within to her before we turn out the light. I find it interesting to watch the ebb and flow of popularity among the books, to see Harold and the Purple Crayon make an initial entry, then zoom to the top of the pile, and finally disappear for a week or two before making a comeback. Between The Carrot Seed and Harold and the Purple Crayon, Crockett Johnson has done pretty well by her, and I still have my Barkis and Barnaby books to show her, one day.

She also likes the Peanuts aphorism books she pulled out of my collection, "Love is Walking Hand in Hand" and "I Need All the Friends I Can Get", which to my mind is a far worse book, but one that catches her eye just as often as the other. One of the very first memories I have is of my father reading Peanuts comic strips to me, so it's nice to see her drawn* to to Schultz and Johnson. It's the first proof that the comic strip appreciation gene I got from Dad might have legs. She certainly doesn't get it from her mother, who looked at me rather oddly when I told her that her two-year-old now had her own subscription bag at the comic book store.**

Her fascination with the dictionary has been kind of a surprise. I know why, I think. The first time she pulled it out and asked "Wat's dis, daddy?", I told her it was a dictionary, and that it had all the words from all the stories in it. What she heard was "It has all the stories in it." It was the last book she handed me that night.

"Read stories, daddy."

So I turned out the light, after gaining some time by telling her that this was a special story book, one that you had to read in the dark, and made up a story. In my humble opinion, it was one god-awful stinker of a story. I shan't be writing children's books anytime soon. It was about a little girl, who, surprise, had the same name as Ngnat, and lived in a house with three kitties and two parents just like Ngnat's kitties and parents, and who went to school every day just like Ngnat and played with her friends, just like Ngnat. My god, it was a piece of unimaginative crap.

And she's made me tell it every night since.

I know from experience that it's not the story that counts. It's lying back in a warm cocoon of blankets, feeling the chilly air on your face and your father's weight beside you, using his arm as a pillow and drifting off to sleep to the sound of his voice. If there is a Platonic ideal of contentment, that feeling is the closest I ever got to it. If I have to tell the same horrifyingly dull story to my daughter at the end of each night so that she can trace out her own contentment asymptote, so be it.