So, Bill White had an entertaining idea in light of my destruction of a children’s biography of Margaret Sanger: A contest to create titles of similarly depraved children’s lit. (Reminds me of the Maimway Toy skits that Saturday Night Live did years ago - remember, things like “Big Bag of Broken Glass”) This has limitless potential.

No cheating. No going to the library and finding some of the stuff they really have there. OK, I won’t just pick on the library - some of my favorite people work there - bookstores have a great selection, too. The redeeming value of a bookstore is that these books need to be purchased - not just checked out by a kid with a bike and his own library card. This makes me so nostalgic for the day when the children’s library was a ‘safe’ zone and any ‘edgy’ material was kept in the adult department. (And growing up in a relatively small town where the head librarian was a friend of my parents’, I knew better than to attempt to check out anything that appeared to be not for my eyes.......) And the schools and library did not have an agenda to help the poor children of parents who wished to protect them from the details of the adult worlld.

While I’m at it, I’ll add a big thank you to the friend of my mother’s (who is also my best friend’s mother) who plucked Portnoy’s Complaint from a bag of purchases I was hauling home from a used book sale. She said she’d keep it for me ‘til I was older. And she did. The last time I was visiting her house she said she still had Portnoy’s Complaint in her attic - did I want it now? I think I had probably read it back in college, but I was touched that she kept her word - she would give it to me when I was old enough. Thank God for adults who look out for children!!!