Underwear reigns

It is a very great responsibility to be an aunt to Tiny Persons, who are so impressionable and in need of wise guidance from the adults around them in order to find their way in life's often confusing maze. That is why, when I recently searched for a book to give to one particular Tiny Person on the occasion of his fourth birthday -- a particularly impressionable age -- I chose, after great deliberation, Bear in Underwear. 


Bear in Underwear is, despite its name, a story about a bear and underwear. It is one of those books that are a hit with Tiny Persons because they possess one timeless characteristic: an object that is unmentionable in Polite Circles. A bear, quite unplanned, stumbles upon a castaway backpack, which the bear takes with him but is smart enough not to open it up. He eventually succumbs to peer pressure about what is in the backpack, and opens it up to reveal Harry Potter. No, not really. The backpack is hoarding multitudes of underwear, of every shape and color and size and texture.


The bear is further persuaded by his peers to try on the underwear, and herein lies the enjoyment for Tiny Persons. This is precisely what no child would be allowed to do in real life. How many times, growing up, did you hear YOUR parents admonish you not to try on strange underwear you'd found in a strange backpack, and their sarcastic "If all your friends were trying on underwear from a strange backpack, would YOU, too?"


Underwear is king in the Tiny Realm.


Bear in Underwear is fun to read, which is fortunate for parents, because with a child at this age parents must be prepared to read a particular book to the child approximately 5 gazillion times a day, sometimes repeating it before they have even finished reading it. So naturally the parent wants a book he or she can enjoy, too. Now if the parent is forced to read a book such as Froggie Drinks from a Big Cup 5 gazillion times a day, either the parent or the child may very well never make it to the child's fourth birthday. 


But Bear in Underwear proved to be a hit with the Tiny Person's father, who appreciates that it is not only amusing but also has "good rhythm." He laments the great quantity of poor-quality children's books that get published, he believes, only because "this world is unjust."


The Tiny Person was desirous of sharing Bear in Underwear with his classmates, so one day his father came to school and read it to all the Tiny Persons. Predictably, the book produced lots of tee hees, but the most popular feature was the actual underwear-- tighty whities -- that the bear wears on the cover of the book. For this reason the book had to be passed around the circle of Tiny Persons, so everyone had a chance to firsthand touch the bear's tighty whities.


If any author is struggling, at this moment, with how to really involve readers in the entire book experience, that author should take a lesson from Bear in Underwear. He or she can do no better than to include actual underwear somewhere in the book. And it won't even matter whether or not the book is for children.