The Night Max Wore His Wolf Suit

The night Max wore his wolf suit and made mischief of one kind and another is surely one of the greatest and most influential nights of my life.

I started reading Maurice Sendak's "Where the Wild Things Are" to my own little Max when he was less than two weeks old.

And through Max's early childhood, as our repertoire expanded to include the likes of "Moo, Ba, La La La" and "Polar Bear, Polar Bear," "Ferdinand" and "Caps for Sale,""Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good Very Bad Day" and "Make Way for Ducklings," Demi's gorgeously drawn and morally weighted tales and the D'Aulaires' spirited collections of Greek and Norse myths -- a perpetually burgeoning list pared each night to just five titles in the glider rocker -- "Where the Wild Things Are"was a nightly staple. Even when we got to "Charlotte's Web," "Wild Things" was never put away, and it played the same role for my son Oscar.

The magic of "Wild Things" didn't originate in parental nostalgia as it did with some other books and songs, though I remember so clearly my mother reading the book to me. And it didn't stem from Max's association with his namesake, though the first time he gleefully sounded out his name was with the letters printed on Sendak's "private boat for Max." (I must admit I didn't discourage the link, cobbling together a wolf suit for Max's first dress-up Halloween. And Oscar thought for years that "Wild Things" was about his big brother.)

The larger, warmer, scarier, wilder and ultimately more satisfying magic was all Sendak's.

To analyze the story and pictures risks losing site of that magic and the fun of a glowering, untamable Max who seems to giggle as his room becomes the jungle-like "world all around" and literally doesn't blink as he tames the snaggle-toothed wild things who "roared their terrible roars and gnashed their terrible teeth and rolled their terrible eyes and showed their terrible claws." The three wordless, double-page illustrations in the middle of the book -- of newly crowned King Max dancing with the wild things under a full moon, swinging with them from tree to tree, and being feted by a wild thing parade -- are as pure as artistic renderings of childish fantasy get. As such they also give the readers and children a chance for their own enhancements: Max and I sang "Louie, Louie" during the moon dance, screamed like Tarzan in the tree scene and sang "Hail to the Max" for the parade.

But for an adult, especially one who has memorized the words and pictures through thousands of readings, it's impossible to miss how truly "Wild Things" captures childhood: the defiant boy whose untamed imagination shapes and masters the larger, monster-like adults in his life before, on his own terms and in his own good time, returning to the "night of his very own room where he found his supper waiting for him." Max and I always said together the book's next and last phrase, four words and a period that appear on an otherwise unillustrated page. "And it was still hot."

After Sendak's death this morning, I repeatedly heard and read commentators saying Sendak didn't shy away from the "dark" side of childhood. Fair enough. But he was also writing, as eloquently as authors who used hundreds of more pages, about the comfort and warmth children have -- or should have -- when the tantrums and wildness have burned out. The adult world is a scary one, and children can and do confront it with their own scary behavior and imaginings. But a child's life is also about that warmth, and how it helps children learn to tame their own wildness.

Mickey hears a racket in the night as Sendak's "In the Night Kitchen" opens, and instead of being frightened yells at the noisemaker, "Quiet Down There!" What follows is a Jewish Brooklyn boy's impressionistic fantasy in the warmest, best-smelling and most comforting place of many childhoods: the kitchen. And like the Max he resembles, Mickey finishes the adventure safe and warm in his bedroom.

Sendak's "Pierre," who would only say, "I don't care!" vexes his parents to the point of abandonment, and get's eaten by a lion for the stubborn arrogance that every parent comes to dread (and sometimes secretly admire). But the doctor manages to shake free Pierre, who "laughed because he wasn't dead." The Lion takes home Pierre and his parents and stays on as a weekend guest.

Childhood is, for the lucky or blessed, both a warm and scary place. So is parenthood. But it is hard to learn and retain that sense of balanced perspective, even if, I'll say again, we're lucky or blessed to get comfort with the fright. Rereading "Where the Wild Things Are" this morning, I realize Sendak was a source of both great stories and that perspective. And I'm sad that he's gone.