Winnie-the-Pooh
100 Years and Going Strong
Photo Credit: J. Howeth
November was National Picture Month – thirty days of celebrating that magical art form. I could easily have highlighted a book a day my on Instagram page but what I decided to do instead was show off just a few of my favorites. One of those was “Finding Winnie” by Lindsay Mattick and illustrated by Sophie Blackall. It’s the true story of the bear that served as the model for the Winnie-the-Pooh stories, the first written in the 1924 by A. A. Milne.
I would like to think Pooh and his friends are as popular as ever. They’ve been around for a long time. I discovered Winnie when I was in the 4th grade. I wasn’t a strong reader despite my dad having taught me to read when I was four. The fact that I arrived with some of the rudiments seemed to tick off my first-grade teacher (she was nearing retirement, was the prototype for the love-forsaken spinster, and had had her fill of kids. She was really quite unpleasant.). As a result, she placed me in the weakest of three reading groups – the Bluebirds, I think. It felt like a punishment and was the beginning of the undermining of my reading skills that unfortunately followed me through school. No surprise then that by the time I got to grade four, I wasn’t all that thrilled with reading. But once a week we had to go to the library, and we had to check out a book. Somehow, I stumbled across two small, maroon-colored, thread-bare books with broken spines and tattered, beat-up corners. Inside were these simple, black and white line drawings of what I thought was a little girl and her bear. Later I learned that boys were dressed a lot like girls prior to and including the early decades of the twentieth century and that the child dragging a stuffed bear down the stairs was, in fact, a boy named Christopher Robin. And Christopher Robin’s BFF was Winnie. I was enchanted.
Photo Credit: J. Howeth
I still am. I love everything Winnie-the-Pooh. But taking a step back, I ask myself why. What is it about that bear that I love so much? First, it’s probably his sweetness that captured my heart. Never unkind, he’s everyone’s friend. Then there’s his naivete and gullibility exaggerated by his simple-minded literalism that even young children seem to understand. Ironically, by stating the obvious, which he does in his slow bear like-way, he appears wise, despite the juxtaposed theme that runs through the books of Pooh being a bear of very little brain.
Very much like the cast of characters from today’s “Toy Story” who exist entirely in Andy’s bedroom, the characters in the Pooh stories inhabit a very specific world as well, each with clearly defined roles. They perfectly characterize the personalities of real people: know-it-all Owl, pessimistic and self-pitying Eeyore, timid Piglet, domineering Rabbit.
When the whole group gets together (Pooh, Kanga and Roo, Owl, Piglet, Pooh, Eeyore, Rabbit, and Christopher) their banter makes for a confusing exchange of comments, one character answering a question from moments before whose time has passed and now has no bearing on the conversation – capitalizing on the humor inherent in misdirection.
I recently reread the Pooh stories, being able to only recall the broad strokes of the tales, and I realized something. There’s a footnote to my initial encounter with Winnie: my father was traveling a lot for his job that year and on the nights that he was out of town, my mom invited me to sleep with her. So, after my bedtime snack of graham crackers and milk, I got to crawl into that lovely, warm bed that smelled of her perfume and snuggle close. My precious little books came with me and together we delighted in the stories of that bear and his friends. Consequently, I recognize now that my initial memories of reading Winnie-the-Pooh are inextricably entangled with the precious, private memory of my mom and the sacredness of sharing an experience with only one other person . . . in our very own Hundred Acre Wood.
If interested, here’s a great article about “Finding Winnie” by Melissa LaSalle a.k.a. The Book Mommy:
