I recall a picture book with which I was wholly obsessed when I was small. I've never again seen it, even after troubling various librarians and exhaustive online searching. I can't find it. My mom checked it out of the library. It had a shiny and yellowed protective cover and was pretty large. I'm embarrassed to say it was a story about a pegasus--but an AWESOME pegasus.
The illustrations were all in Black & White. Beautiful. I have almost no memory of the story because my mother would make it up each time she read it to me. It always changed. I know that a pegasus lived in a house, and one night decided to fly out of one of the windows all over the town. Looked at stuff. Did things. I must have loved all the different versions more than anything because the only picture I remember is the very manly winged horse flying out the window and my feeling of overwhelming excitement wondering where he would be going and what he would be doing that night.
I suppose it's possible my mother just made the whole thing up by blotting out the existing words of a very terrible book with excellent illustrations and I never noticed the tape or the white-out or her deft hands shielding me from crappy, indelible narrative. I hope I don't wake up one day and books are dead, awakening to the snap of the final bullet sounding in the air as I realize the novelty has worn fully and completely off. I try to imagine my mother reading the manly pegasus book to me from a tablet and it gives me a stomach ache. But surely if a way is the only way you know, growing up, it is just as precious? Maybe? Help?
~ Bernard
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