happy 100th birthday to Winnie-the-Pooh-- a personal retrospective

When Simon and Schuster sent me a copy of the 100th anniversary edition of Winnie-the-Pooh, which includes both books), last fall (which has just released, though the actual birthday is October 14), I started writing this post in my mind....

When I was 2 or 3, my grandfather started reading Pooh to me and my big sister.  We spent hours on his lap, following the adventures of Pooh and Piglet and all, and my grandfather became so associated with Pooh (quoting him often, especially "No brains at all some of them.  Just a little fluff blown in by mistake"), that we started calling him Bear, and the name stuck.  Here is a picture of us (I am the one on the left, aged 2), unfortunately reading some other book.

When people talk about the Winnie the Pooh books in terms of the enchantment and joy of childhood, I give them serious side eye. That's not what I see in them.  

Take, for instance, the story of Eeyore's birthday. Piglet's joy at realizing he had a great present for Eeyore, a lovely balloon, his misery when the balloon pops, and the happy ending that it was still a good present is not enchanted joy.  It makes me weep, because I find it so very easy to feel what Piglet feels.

There is much more anxiety in these stories than there is joy--anxieties such as children feel and relate too deeply. These are not dismissed, but recognized and then alleviated with love, and this is what I took from the books to hold in my heart.

Here are some things I learned from the books-- that you are loveable even when you mess up and you haven't in fact been hunting a woozle, that there are people who will care when you get stuck in someone's door, that the stranger, in this case Kanga, may be new and different, but can enrich the community and become part of the family, that trying to fix people to suit your own expectations is a fool's errand, as Rabbit learned, that even when you are grown up, the things you loved as a child don't vanish, and many more.  I am all the better for having these things woven into my way of being in the world at a young age.  

But mostly the multiple readings of Winnie-the-Pooh were proof to me that I was deeply loved and also instilled in me that some books are like family that you can count on for your whole life.  The copies that Bear read to us were my mother's when she was little, and I read these same copies to my own children.  When my mother was hospitalized in agony for a week last summer, my sister and I read her own favorite childhood book out loud to her (Golden Cat, by Albert Paine, which I appreciated lots more as a child than I did this time around), which offered comfort.  I think that when I am in similar straits, I would like my children to take me back to the 100 Acre Wood, a place where I loved and was loved so very much.  (Probably the whole Piglet balloon episode will make me tear up for the millionth time, as it just did when I took the picture included here).

Happy 100th aniversery year to a beloved bear! I hope the new edition gives many, many children all the gifts these stories gave to me.