Childhood Treasure

I don't know when I first discovered my love for reading. I feel as though I was born reading. Lots of people can name a specific book or moment in their childhood that turned them into bookworms, but I cannot.  Reading was simply always there.  It was always what I did.

However, I can recall the first book that I cherished, the first book I couldn't get enough of, that I read over and over again and never grew tired of it.  The Puppy Who Wanted a Boy.  A sweet, beautiful story with beautiful pictures, I read this many times when I was about seven years old.  I think my mom even read it to me a lot when I was younger. 

I don't know what happened to that book.  Lost somewhere with all the other things that disappear as you grow older.  But I found a new copy, and I bought it about five years ago.  The cover isn't the same, but the story is just as sweet, just as wonderful, just as magical as it was the first time I heard this story.

This is the cover of the copy I own now.  I don't care that I'm nearly thirty years old, I read this book every year.  You find little treasures in life, and you enjoy them over and over again, even if people look at you strangely.  Life is too short to worry about things like that.  Yes, I read children's books for myself.  Yes, I own a collection of children's books and I don't even have any children.  They are for me.  I don't care what age group the book is targeting, if it's good, I'll buy it and cherish it.

I will say one thing that always made me sad about this book: I always cried for the mother.  I know dogs aren't humans (try telling my dogs that, though!!), and they don't "bond" with their young the way humans do ... but these are BOOK dogs.  So ... yes they do!  And Petey leaves his mom.  I always wondered if he ever got to see her again, if she missed him all the time, if she wished she could have held onto him a little longer ...

Sigh.  I'm feeling teary-eyed now thinking about this.  I'm a dork, I can't help it.  I get emotional over fictional characters, whether they are MacKayla Lane and Jericho Barrons from Fever or Petey and his mother from The Puppy Who Wanted a Boy ... makes no difference.  I feel the characters.