August’s poem

Robert Louis Stevenson, “Bed in Summer,” from A Child’s Garden of Verses.

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In winter I get up at night

And dress by yellow candle-light.

In summer, quite the other way,

I have to go to bed by day.

I have to go to bed and see

The birds still hopping on the tree,

Or hear the grown-up people’s feet

Still going past me in the street.

And does it not seem hard to you,

When all the sky is clear and blue,

And I should like so much to play,

To have to go to bed by day?

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A few remarks.

(1) No wonder it was hard for little R.L.S. to go to bed in summertime. The Scottish sun doesn’t set until who knows when.

(2) Many children’s stories end with the characters peacefully and easily going to sleep; this poem knows better.

A few other classics with a good measure of “sleep ambivalence”:

Charlotte’s Web
Goodnight Moon
Madeline

The runaway baby

More napping songs for Samuel:

We’ve been to church twice. Samuel won’t sit still. During the service, Karin & I allow him to roam the back hallways; we take turns supervising him. Afterward, when we wish to mingle with the other Christians, we have to keep him from dashing out into the parking lot. It’s like a game of “capture the flag.”

I wonder if his diet is a cause. I’ve started giving him peanut butter and jelly toast in the mornings. It puts him in an ecstatic mood, and he runs up and down the house, for about an hour.

The other night, we found The Runaway Bunny, one of his favorite books, behind the couch: it had been missing for several days. “Bunny! Bunny!” he said. Then he sat on my lap and paged through that book while I also read.

Presently, I realized that I, too, was reading a treatise of leporine theology: Rabbit, Run.