Story Time

Across a far-ranging career as a writer, Sandol Stoddard wrote fiction and non-fiction, for adults and children, producing 26 published books and countless essays, articles and poems.

In our house, though, she was always simply “Mom”: a dynamic presence overflowing with ideas and opinions, reassuringly predictable in some respects and thoroughly unpredictable in others.

And while Mom was probably proudest of her groundbreaking 1978 non-fiction work The Hospice Movement: A Better Way of Caring for the Dying, her best-selling book—still in print today, almost 60 years after its initial publication—remains that perpetual Valentine’s Day gift I Like You.

A children’s book.

Mom wrote 17 of them, ranging from the enchantingly clever picture-book poetry of her 1960 debut, The Thinking Book, to message-driven narratives like Growing Time, to her tween fantasy novella On The Way Home. She was a natural storyteller who found her rhythm in creating subtly subversive children’s books that invited the adult reader into the mind and world of a child.

My brothers and I each had our own favorites over the years. The recently reissued “cat book” (My Very Own Special Particular Private and Personal Cat, 1963) has generally been high on all of our lists, a memento of four childhoods heavily populated with feline friends. Growing Time will always hold a special place for me, as it grew out of the difficult conversation Mom had to have with five-year-old me after our beloved cat died. And I can still remember how she assembled the initial sketches of On The Way Home out of thin air in the form of a serialized bedtime story she began telling me when I was nine years old.

And then there’s From Ambledee to Zumbledee: An A.B.C. of Rather Special Bugs, a witty picture-book-in-verse cataloguing an imaginary universe of made-up insects. Ambledee was the result of my preschool-aged habit of bringing the tiny creatures I discovered in our vegetable garden into the house for Mom’s inspection (“What’s dis?”). Despite having shrieked more than once at the wriggling creatures I thrust up into her face, she dedicated the book to me.

Over the years, as both my family and my writing ambitions grew, I thought from time to time about trying to write a children’s book. But besides not having a story in mind, I always felt like this was Mom’s arena, her turf. I neither felt like I could compete, nor wanted to appear to be trying to; like many young people, I was both drawn toward following in my parent’s footsteps and determined to forge my own path. As a sort of compromise, my writing gravitated instead toward essays and music writing and eventually, novels.

That was the end of that story for many years, many essays, and several books.

And then we had our first grandchild.

And then Mom passed.

And then we had our second grandchild.

And then—ah, but that’s a story for next time…