I had a request for a story, and so I went to the classroom shelf to look at the books. We settled on "Suppose You Meet a Dinosaur", which kept the kids well and truly entertained with its rhyming story line "Your shopping cart begins to spin and dings the dino on the shin. She roars a terrifying roar, What do you tell the dinosaur?" Since this is a book on manners, the proper answer is (of course) "I'm sorry."
As I flipped through the books, though, I came to an old one: 'Make Way for Ducklings'. I remembered being seated on a mat for a story time long ago, hearing a teacher reading that story to us. For a woman with a memory like a sieve, I remembered distinctly that I was already familiar with the story having heard Captain Kangaroo reading it. The memory was so clear to me, Captain Kangaroo's quiet voice reading Robert McCloskey's gentle story.
Strange, isn't it? I held that book for a moment, caressing the Caldecott medal embossed on the front and I remembered distinctly what it was like to be five.
My nostalgic moment did not last long. It couldn't. I was surrounded by five year olds who wanted to hear about meeting a dinosaur in a grocery store. I shelved that old book, and I sat down on a mat, and once again, it was story time.