hold on to them

Last night my ten year old son came up to me clutching a book inscribed to me from my father on the Christmas I was eleven. Gnomes. I so loved the whimsical silliness of that book. Now that my son has been exposed to the gnomes of Norse mythology through his endless perusal of D'Aulaires' Book of Norse Myths, the title caught his attention on the book shelves. And he was delighted to escape the dark and grumpy denizens of underground mining and metal fashioning present in the Nordic depictions of gnomes to the lightness of cute and rosy gnomes peeing on the side of barns. We crawled into bed and read nearly the whole thing. So remember not to weed the shelves too thoroughly. You never know when an old friend might visit from the ranks of the long neglected.