![]() There was a book about a lonely mouse - “Do You Want to Be My Friend?” And, of course, there was the endearing “Grouchy Lady Bug” with big black spots against her shell of red. There was a book about a “Little Cloud” who wanders off and changes into different shapes: a soft white sheep, a puffy-looking rabbit with long ears. My memory is fuzzy, but I think the book she showed me was probably “The Very Hungry Caterpillar.” I soon discovered others by him in the classrooms I was visiting. It was a teacher in a first-grade classroom in the early 1980s who had introduced me, and managed to addict me, to one of the early Eric Carle books she loved. When his own death at the age of 91 was reported in the press, many of my readers and old friends and teachers of young children sent me thoughtful emails, because I’d spoken frequently of how much his work had meant to me. ![]() “I miss her,” he wrote, “every day and hour.” Still, he noted, “nature is chipping away at us.” He had lost his wife to cancer more than two years before. “After cataract surgery,” he wrote, “my eyes are good,” so he was free to drive himself around. In the winter of 2018 he told me, “Just bought a red car yesterday.” He said he couldn’t “figure out all the new gizmos” on the dashboard, but he seemed to be exuberant (I hope this isn’t disrespectful), like a very young boy who had been given a new toy. Another consisted of vertical and horizontal strokes that seemed to be defying one another. One was just a swirl of red and purple strokes that looked like squirmy creatures against a yellow-speckled background. One was of a reindeer that had flowers growing from its antlers. “As far as our dear leader goes,” he said of Donald Trump, “his grandfather should have stayed in Germany.” He asked me, “Did you know that the Heinz tomato sauce guy” (actually, the father of that “guy”) “came from the same village at about the same time” as our dear leader’s family did? His letters were full of odd little detours like this that he found intriguing.Īnd he kept on sending pictures. “I was six weeks in the hospital,” he wrote - “stroke, heart, lung and kidney” - and had “almost died.” But he kept on writing lively and amusing letters, some of them surprisingly irreverent and political. His health, he told me in 2015, had gone into a serious decline the year before. He had previously lived for more than 30 years in Northampton, Mass., but now returned there, it appeared, only intermittently. Most of his letters - those I have not mislaid in the chaos of my cluttered home - were mailed to me from the Florida Keys, where he lived for “the greater part,” he said, of his final years on the island of Tavernier. Under a glorious collage of a multicolored angel that he mailed to me one winter, he had written, “Homage to Paul Klee,” who, he said, was “my favorite artist” and “painted many angels, the earliest recorded when he was 5 years old.” It was out of the grimness of those dark and loveless days that he believed he had evolved his longing for bright and joyful colors. But he said that his parents, who were German immigrants, returned to Germany in 1936 when he was 6 years old and that his teacher at a school in Stuttgart was a cold, unfriendly person who had no interest in the artistry of children. He said that he had “a perfectly happy kindergarten year” and a first-grade teacher, “old Miss Frickey,” whom he remembered fondly because she was “kind and supportive” about his love of drawing. In some of his letters he described his childhood and early education in Syracuse, N.Y., where he was born in 1929. “It’s just how they eat cake.”) He said it was part of a “nonsense book” that he hadn’t finished yet. But the image of the man was upside down. Another was of a man and his wife sitting in their kitchen eating cake with chocolate frosting. ![]() One was of a yellow duck - it looked more like a chicken - that was wearing pinstripe trousers and had big light-pink feet. It was the last of many letters, some typed, others handwritten, he had sent me through the years.Ĭarle, who died in May, often sent me pictures, too, sometimes a collage that he was working on. I’ve been looking at a letter from Eric Carle, written in a frail script in 2019, in which he told me that his health was failing.
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