A) Our two lemon trees are giving us a bumper crop.

B) Every so often, I get nostalgic for the books I loved as a kid.

Those two factoids sort of came together today… faced with a superabundance of citrus, I was thinking about a story in which the young boy saves the parade after the marching band gets all puckered up thanks to someone loudly sucking on a lemon. I thought it was a Homer Price story… thus the picture.

But flipping through my copy… no! So I asked ChatGPT. The story I’m thinking of is Lentil (also by Robert McCloskey) (which shockingly doesn’t have its own Wikipedia page). Which I don’t have a copy of. Oh well. Some day in a thrift store I’ll find one.

I never lived in McCloskey’s uber-wholesome New England… I don’t imagine anybody did. And yet, yes I did, and still do, because those stories (and a zillion others) from that same optimistic era of children’s literature really influenced me. That’s how you’re supposed to behave, isn’t it? Yes it is. You’re curious. You don’t want to dress up. Occasionally you break a window or disclose a secret. You get punished. And later, you get a nice dessert because you’ve learned your lesson.

Today’s kids — who am I kidding, today’s parents— are learning the same how-to-live lessons from Love Island and the Kardashians. So the future’s probably fine.