August 15, 2005
I took the kids to the library earlier today. I've been letting Zeke pick out most of his own books (I do exercise some administrative control or we'd wind up with nothing but Thomas the Tank Engine and Bob the Builder books), and today he picked one called "Jellybeans". It had a friendly picture of two anthropomorphic animals and some jellybeans on the cover.
So I get this book out to read it to him earlier today, and it starts out innocently enough, with the first character (Bob) getting a letter from the second character (George) about how they should get together later, and will Bob bring jellybeans? Bob writes back and says yes he will, and will George bring drinks? So then they meet up with each other and have a little conversation about what flavor of jellybeans Bob brought and what kind of drinks George brought. Then Bob says, apropos of absolutely nothing, "I wonder if we go to heaven when we're dead."
Imagine the sound of screeching brakes and the smell of burning rubber and you will have a rough approximation of my state of mind at the moment I reached this page. I flipped quickly through the rest of the book and found that, yes, the rest of the book was all about Bob and George having a conversation about whether they would go to heaven if they died, and if so, whether they would be able to recognize each other in heaven because there is a chance that "when we go to heaven we might not remember anything that happened in our lives before we died."
I told Zeke that maybe we should put the Jellybeans book away for now and go find "Daisy-Head Maizie". I mean, cripes, I thought it was going to be a fun little book about jellybeans, not a deep theological discussion about the metaphysics of death and the afterlife.
Maybe I should have just stuck with Bob the Builder.
Posted by Jan at August 15, 2005 11:28 PM
Comments
what bugs me, though, is that if you were LOOKING for a children's book on discussing death, you probably wouldn't find a book named "JELLYBEANS" referenced under "death, talking to children about".
Posted by: christine at August 17, 2005 9:25 AM