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Dad Diary



Lightning can strike twice. 

Years ago, Jon Klassen wrote "I Want My Hat Back." This story concerns a bear who has lost his hat. He interviews various forest creatures .... who deny any knowledge of the missing hat.

One creature--a rabbit, in a hat--seems unusually chatty. "I don't know anything about a hat," he says quickly. "Why would you ask? I'm not a thief. Please don't speak to me again."

We can glide through our days on autopilot, without thinking, and this is what the bear does. (Understandable. The rabbit was so emphatic!) But, eventually, the bear meets a deer, who says, "Can you describe your hat?" In painting a verbal picture, the bear has an important thought. He *has* seen his hat today. The hat was on the chatty rabbit.

We all slide around on a spectrum from good to bad; no one is purely heroic. The bear surprises us by eating the rabbit, reclaiming his hat, then denying he has ever had any "rabbit encounters" in his past.

Like "The Cat in the Hat," this book manages to be startling on basically every page. And it does its work with very few words. It's been a while since I've found a contemporary writer/artist I like as much as David Ezra Stein and Christian Robinson. Jon Klassen fits the bill.
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