Of bees and wild things

Maurice Sendak died on 8 May, and since then it seems you can't go far on the internet without running into something about him or Where the Wild Things Are. I've never been that much of a Sendak person (Wild Things wasn't part of my childhood library), but all this talk of him has reminded me of a book that was, albeit briefly, part of my childhood and has stuck in my mind ever since.

I believe I read it (or more accurately, had it read to me) while we were in Sweden visiting family. I was five and it was the coldest winter in decades. We had a short stay in a ski cabin in the woods, where the snow piled up to the windowsills and we stayed indoors as much as possible (except for a few disasterous – for me – ventures outside to attempt skiing). My mom had brought along a few books I believe she picked out at the Västerås library, one of which was this one:

The Bee-Man of Orn has been at the back of my mind ever since then. I could never remember the title, but I knew I would recognise the cover if I saw it. And at some point a few years back I made the connection between the illustrations of the “monster book” I wasn't interested in and those of the book I couldn't get out of my head.

Google Maurice Sendak and you'll mostly find images of Wild Things. Try to find an obscure book about a man who possibly had something to do with bees and Google's not much help. On Sendak's Wikipedia page I found what I was looking for by trawling through the rather long list of books he authored or illustrated, right at the bottom of his page. The Bee Man of Orn doesn't have it's own Wikipedia page, but there is a page for the story's author, Frank R. Stockton. A little more research reveals that the story is quite a strange one, but apparently Stockton was known for writing unusual stories. And that's probably why it's haunted me all these years. The combination of the absurd story and Sendak's vivid illustrations made for quite a memorable book. And now that I've rediscovered it, I feel I can finally put it to rest.

But trying to track down this particular childhood memory lead me to another discovery...

Perhaps I'm not such a huge fan of Maurice Sendak because I'm not American. It seems that every American child has Where the Wild Things Are on her bookshelf (along with a copy of Goodnight Moon and The Giving Tree, both of which I first heard about as an adult). But in my search for “my” Sendak book, I discovered a lot of beautiful and fanciful images from other of his works, and now I'm intrigued.

I may have, *ahem*, gone overboard with all the images here, but look at the diversity of styles and the imagination! Hover over the images for names of the works they are from.

He was a big fan of Mozart and of opera, apparently:

He collaborated on a children's book version of Brundibar, a Czech-Jewish children's opera with a fascinating and tragic history, and co-created the sets for recent performances.

There's so much more to Sendak than Max and his monsters. And while I still don't feel the need to actually read Where the Wild Things Are (as opposed to just paging through looking at the pictures as I've done before), I do now want to get hold of some of his less famous books. I've ventured a bit further than The Bee-Man, and now I have a whole new list of books to find.

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Incidentally, in my search I came across a more recent take on the The Bee-Man of Orn, illustrated by P.J.Lynch, which looks just as good, so I might have to find that too.

A special morning

This morning was very special. My husband and I woke at about 6am - still dark in wintery Cape Town - to the sounds of an owl outside our window. We listened for a few moments and then J got up and peered through the curtains.

"It's right here on the garage roof!"

I clambered out of bed and looked, and there it was. A big dark shape on the roof. My husband went off to fetch his new telescope but before he returned the owl had flown off.

Disappointed, I climbed back into the warm bed, but J, setting up the telescope at the window anyway, soon said, "There it is! On top of the pine tree!"

There is a huge pine tree in a garden across the road, and perched rather precariously on the very top little branch, was our owl. Now with our telescope lined up, we could take a proper look. It was a beautiful big bird with long, thin ears and huge talons. It sat facing away from us, but occasionally it would turn its head and we could see its face. It was too dark to really make out its colouring, but later we found a similar-looking bird in my mother's bird guide: a Cape Eagle Owl. Sadly it was too dark to get a photo, but this will give you an idea of what we saw:

The wind was blowing lightly and the large owl had to perform quite a balancing act on its little perch. Before long it flew off. We could still hear its ghostly "Hoo hooo" near the house, but we couldn't see it.

I went back to bed for a second time, but J, wide awake now, took the telescope to the upper deck at the back of the house to look at the moon. You see, we are now experiencing a supermoon, with the full moon at the biggest it will be this whole year. Yesterday night we had lain outside on the roof to look at it and it was so bright we could barely see any stars! (J did see an impressive shooting star, though - part of an annual meteor shower that was mostly eclipsed by the moon.) The moon was so bright in fact that it hurt our eyes, and this morning, when I got out of bed for the third (but not final) time, I took my sunglasses along to watch the moon go down.

It was huge and bright and dazzling, and watching it sink behind the mountain was quite awe-inspiring. We took turns watching it through the telescope as it edged away bit by bit. And then it was gone and you would never have known there had been a giant moon hovering over the mountain a few moments before.

And then, with the sun starting to rise, we went back to bed (third time for me) for a last little bit of sleep before getting up for church. A very special, magical morning.