Tender is the night
In a world of terrorist plots, tsunamis, and corporate prosecutions, my son's bedtime story hour can't come soon enough.
Numerous public service campaigns have advocated the benefits of reading to children. First lady Laura Bush has made it the cornerstone of her office, as did her mother-in-law. All have touted the benefits of reading books to our children to set them on a path of learning and discovery.
But there is another benefit rarely mentioned for the adult who reads them: a ticket to your own childhood.
Like so many parents and children at bedtime, my 3-year-old and I snuggle up to read. As we turn the pages, he is transported. Soon we are in the land of sweet summer blueberries that Sal and Little Bear pick with their mixed-up mothers, in a place where gorillas say good night and curious monkeys can fly away on a bunch of balloons. We're in bedrooms where forests grow so we can swing from tree limb to tree limb with the Wild Things. We are where green eggs make sense with ham. We are where the sky is a sapphire blue and studded with stars that twinkle like Tiffany diamonds. There is never enough time to inhabit all these worlds and always a little voice pleading for ''one more story, please" before we shut off the light.
In the morning when I turn the pages of the newspaper to read of the politics brewing over the leak of the identity of a CIA operative, see online that Social Security reform is derailing, again, or watch accounts of pop stars and priests on trial for molesting young boys, I plot my escape to secret gardens. When I can no longer listen to political debates fanned by O'Reilly, Matthews, Scarborough, and Van Susteren, I am comforted by the light in the night kitchen, where Mickey has formed a plane out of dough to fly to the Milky Way. Corduroy with his missing overall button will always find his way home. The Man in the Yellow Hat will rescue me from the conundrums of my own making. And when I am lost a kind Boston policeman will stop traffic to make way for me and some ducklings to cross over to the Public Garden.
The adult world is a world gone mad. Last week well-timed explosions ripped through London's morning commute, rattling Britons' stiff upper lips. Xeroxed photos of the missing are taped to lampposts by relatives and friends as a hollowness hovers like fog. Last year, over a hundred thousand people drowned in saltwater and mud in a tsunami. I had to click off the television when the backhoes were digging mass graves in Thailand. I couldn't watch the bodies of mothers, fathers, sons, and daughters being rolled over and over each other, landing with soft thuds in earthen pits.
I hold on tightly to my son's hand, warm and slightly damp from his bath, as we read his favorite book on trucks. We look at tractors and rigs, diggers and dumpers and backhoes -- only these are used to construct buildings, not graves. Would that we could gift wrap hope in a box and send it on a magic carpet across the seas. Shall we release, he and I, a red polka dot balloon up to some bejeweled heaven to soothe a heart cleft in two?
As the sun dips for the night in Fallujah and Mosul, and the smoke of gunfire settles over Iraqi villages and towns, I think of the men and women in our armed services who long for that uncomplicated sweetness of bedtime reading. To them I say, good night, moon. Good night, air, and God bless parents and children everywhere.
As my little one succumbs, finally, to the sleep he's been fighting, I know as he grows from boy to teen to man, those magic bedtime lands will recede.
I pray he may find a corner or two still filled with barnyard dances and cats that wear hats. As I watch him breathing, asleep in his glow-in-the-dark dinosaur jammies, I know that there will always be room in his heart for just one more story.
Miranda Daniloff is a local writer and essayist. 
