Many Workbooks Available

It all started in the car, where a lot of interesting conversations with kids take place.

As we drove from their house to ours, the grand-twins, Celia and Hank, now 5, were asking me if driving was fun. I responded that I generally enjoy driving. They wondered, they said, because driving the kiddie cars at a local amusement park is fun. They asked me if the kiddie rides would be helpful when they finally learn to drive. Are they actually learning some useful skills? That led to some talk about the required age for driving, which flowed into wondering when you can have a cell phone, which they seemed to think also had a legal minimum age. (Alas, it doesn’t.) They mentioned some teens they know who can drive and who have phones.

Arriving at my house with visions of adulthood dancing in their heads, they immediately set about playing grownup. Celia planted herself at Papa’s desk with some paper and pens, establishing a doctor’s waiting room where she would greet patients and take their vital signs. First, Papa had to fashion a computer for her by writing the alphabet on keys drawn on a sheet of paper. Celia assiduously tapped her fingers on the keys before she called Papa in as her first patient. She appeared to combine the roles of receptionist, nurse, and doctor.

Meanwhile, Hank was asking me questions about grownup books, which, he noted, have so many pages and so many words, but no pictures. He was understandably intrigued by my current book, The Count of Monte Cristo, consisting of many thousands of words filling up 1200 pages. How does such a book happen? he wondered. Does the person writing it produce it in their house? I provided a quick overview of the process of writing the book, sending it to a publisher, and the publisher producing many copies, which people can then buy. (Yep, that’s how easy it is.) I skirted the issues around Alexandre Dumas’s publishing the book in installments first and the complications of translation into English.

I’ll be a publisher, he said. While the medical professional labored in one half of the living room, Hank began setting up his business in the other half. He’s been creating a lot of dinosaur books recently with his own illustrations and dino facts, the pages glued or stapled together. Today, though, he didn’t want his usual quantity of blank paper to draw on. Instead, he asked for paper with writing on it. He wanted pages with text. Papa found him some old printouts with film reviews and press releases. Then we pulled out the stapler and fastened the pages. Hank wasn’t doing any drawing yet.

He wanted one blank sheet of paper for the cover. He asked me to spell out the words that he had chosen for the title. Many. I spelled many. Workbooks, he said, but told me to just spell work because he could spell books. I spelled work, and Hank wrote it down. He hesitated. He told me that he could spell book, but not books. That was easily solved.

Next, Hank asked me to spell Uh. Puzzled, I said, Many Workbooks Uh? Hank said, No. Many Workbooks Uh-Vailable. So I dutifully spelled available, which Hank dutifully transcribed.

His book title was Many Workbooks Available. Don’t ask me. I have no idea.

Because grown-up books usually have some art on the cover, Hank moved to the dining room table to complete the cover. We stapled it to the front of his pages. Under the title Many Workbooks Available was a drawing of a woman with her breast exposed as she fed a baby. Hank has a two-month-old baby brother.

The book went home with the twins. They requested it be read to them at bedtime. The parents reported that the film-related text on Hank’s book pages had largely to do with Holocaust movies, requiring some on-the-spot editing as they read. The kids asked for this bedtime reading at least a couple of evenings in a row, but were nonplussed that Mommy and Daddy’s readings, with their impromptu censorship, differed slightly. Even so, Celia’s verdict was that she liked it.