The bell rang at 1:30 pm and ten-year-old Ana walked into Ms. Goodrich’s classroom for her one hour and forty minutes of English. The memory is quite foggy eleven years later, but she sat in the desk, chit-chatting with classmates while kicking her legs back and forth as they hovered over the ground. The teacher walked across the classroom from her desk in the back of the room to close shut the entrance; she presented a small, yellow paperback copy with a little dog sketched on the cover.
“For the next two weeks, during Reading Time, we will all be reading this book right here.” She described it to be a small poetry book—I’m sure we were discussing Poetry as a literary genre—about a little boy named Jack that didn’t like to write poems for Ms. Stretchberry’s class at first, but later surprised himself.
Ms. Goodrich first gave Ana the book to see it. After the ten-year-old sifted through the fresh pages, she passed it to the student behind her. Ms. Goodrich continued on with that day’s lesson; in the last twenty minutes of class, she called every one, one by one, to her desk and gave everyone their own copy of Sharon Creech’s Love that Dog.
Eager and impatient as Ana has always been, she went home to read the book from cover to cover—by nighttime, she stood confused on her bed, kind of aware of what happened, but refused to acknowledge it. The novel is written in verse, divided by dates (like journal entries), and carries the innocent tone of a child. Jack, the main character and first-person narrator, starts out the first page with:
“I don’t want to
because boys
don’t write poetry.
Girls do.”
Jack read in class a poem about a red wheelbarrow, and they had the first assignment to write a poem; he decided to write about a fast, blue car. When his teacher asked him, “Why a blue car?”, he responds with, “The wheelbarrow guy didn’t say why a red wheelbarrow, why should I?”.
With every passing entry, it’s more or less the same dynamic of him resisting his writing assignments while doubting everything poetry-wise; not only this, but slowly opening up about his relationship with his dog Sky. The novel keeps going deeper into how he picked him in the animal shelter, how Ms. Stretchberry encouraged him to keep writing poems because—whether he admitted it or not—he was good at it, and about his afternoons playing in the neighborhood street when he’d shout after seeing an incoming car so every kid would get out of the way on time. At one point, one of Jack’s poems described how Sky was outside playing with the neighborhood kids on the street, when a fast, muddy blue car was incoming, everyone got out of the way except…
Ana didn’t want to think that Sky was gone from the beginning, she wanted him to be alive, and still play with Jack, protect and love him. At first, Ana didn’t like Jack because he said only girls wrote poetry, but later laughed at things he would say in other poems or entries. She later liked Jack and wanted him to be happy, too.
This is a novel to always keep on the bookshelf. First, the edition itself is elegant for a children’s book: a very simple paperback of 86 pages, with solid, banana yellow flaps, big fonts, and everything in the book printed in sky blue—symbolism at a young age. Second, the wording is beautiful; fast-paced, and rich in context. The author teaches the child reader about Robert Frost and other classic poets, plus, in the back, it includes a selection of poems that the teacher Ms. Stretchberry used in Jack’s classroom.
But most importantly, it was the first book Ana read that revealed the topic of death and loss, in the most delicate manner. A few years prior to this book, she had lost my grandfather on my mother’s side, and to this day, nobody in the family talks about him, not even a whisper. As a kid, she thought it was better to pretend he disappeared, that this big powerful father in the sky decided it was time for him to go.
This is a thin, travel-friendly book and can be read through in one sitting. It’s a children’s book adults should read, in Ana’s take.
With this book, it taught the little ten-year-old about something called grief, learning to let others go but to keep their memory alive. It also teaches the importance of actually sharing these feelings inside. If you talk and learn to express yourself, in a way, it’s like they’re still with you, like it did for Jack.
The book closes with the last poem: “Love that Dog”.
Love that dog,
like a bird loves to fly,
I said I love that dog
like a bird loves to fly
Love to call him in the morning
love to call him
“Hey there, Sky!”