Typically, my wife puts our baby to sleep at night. I usually work late into the night and listen to the crying, the cooing, the quiet hushes, and then the quiet, period.
Tonight, with my wife out at work, I was put to the task of putting the baby to sleep. I gave her much milk and put her in her crib twice – to no avail.
I had understood that Goodnight Moon is a good book to read to children before they fell asleep. And as I read the short, almost tragic words to my daughter, she did. She fell asleep on the last page of the book, which says “Goodnight” to all the objects and the people and the animals in the room.
To me, it said, over and over, “Goodbye.” It’s one of the saddest stories I’ve ever read. The illustrations, by Clement Hurd, are beautiful, sad, elegiac. The story is by the inimitable Margaret Wise Brown who revived the illustrated children’s story. I imagine she used her middle name often.