My Top Ten Favorite Children's Books

In 2017, my wife, Maria and I welcomed our rainbow baby, Miguel, into this world. It would also serve as an introduction into the world of children’s books, particularly board books and picture books.

Maria and I are lifelong readers. Not surprisingly, we’re picky about our reading material, including children’s books. I have found that we’re both sensitive to language and a book’s illustration style. We’ll pass on a book if either element is lackluster.

As a parent, especially when your child becomes attached to a book, you will read it over and over and over and over again so my favorite children’s books have to be ones that are not nauseating to read. (It’s okay if one or two parts of a book are a bit cheesy, if you’re asking me.) They must also be aesthetically pleasing. And since you’ll read them, night after night after night, my favoritest children’s books tend to provide teeny visual details to point out and remark upon to enrich the reading experience, or have a number of characters that lends itself to reading them in playful voices. For me, it’s all about finding different wrinkles to keep the readings from becoming stale.

Without further ado, here’s my top-10 list in chronological order from Miguelito’s infanthood to his present surly toddlerdom:

Pandemic Recap (Thus Far) - Part Three

December 2020

December 2, 2020, the U.S. reported 2,760 COVID-19 deaths.

 

Eric Feigl-Ding, an epidemiologist and health economist and a Senior Fellow at the Federation of American Scientists in Washington DC tweeted this image:

Pandemic Recap (Thus Far) - Part Two

June 2020

Before the pandemic, my three-year-old son and I had time to ourselves during our weekly grocery store trips. That was our thing, our dedicated time together. And I missed it terribly.

 

Before the pandemic descended upon us, our son was already far more attached to my wife. But his attachment to her became more extreme during the pandemic. If she wanted to run an errand, she would have to sneak out of her parents’ house without him noticing because he would otherwise cry and wail if he knew she was gone.

 

During his early years, I saw my son cry on many, many occasions. Early in the pandemic, when my wife would try to leave the house to go to the store, he would wail with what felt like fearful despair. He would stop as soon as she stepped back into the house. It was a different type of crying. If we had tried to explain the pandemic to him then, he couldn’t have comprehended what was happening, but he knew something was terribly wrong. I have no doubt.

Pandemic Recap (Thus Far) - Part One

January 2020

On January 10, 2020, the first SARS-CoV-2 genome sequence was posted on an open internet depository by Chinese researchers, confirming that the pneumonia-like outbreak in Wuhan, China—reportedly occurring since November 2019—stemmed from a coronavirus. The Chinese government denied the virus was spreading among humans until January 19.

 

On January 21^st, a Washington state resident who had recently traveled to Wuhan became the first person in the United States with a confirmed case of the novel coronavirus.

 

Two days later, the Chinese government locked down Wuhan, a major transportation hub and city with a metropolitan population of 11 million people.

 

On January 31^st, the first confirmed case of COVID-19 in the San Francisco Bay Area, where I live, was identified in Santa Clara County. It was a man who had recently traveled to Wuhan. That same day, the World Health Organization (WHO), for only the sixth time in its seventy-three-year existence, declared a public health emergency once the worldwide death toll from SARS-CoV-2 passed 200 and after an exponential jump to more than 9,800 cases.

 

February 2020

A few days later, the second confirmed COVID-19 case—unrelated to the first one—was identified in Santa Clara County. She had also just returned home from Wuhan.

 

On February 6, 2020, 57-year-old Patricia Dowd—a resident of San Jose, CA—was the first known death caused by COVID-19 in the United States. She had no foreign travel history.

 

At the time, I worked at a community health clinic in Fremont, a sprawling suburb bordering Santa Clara County. A standing sign at the clinic’s main entrance posted information about the novel coronavirus. It warned patients about the virus and noted that all patients would be screened for any recent travel to China, or contact with anyone who had recently returned from China.

Little Charlie’s Travels

Before my wife and I brought a child into this world, we had Little Charlie.

Little Charlie is a small teddy bear. He appears to be of the Ursus maritimus species. My wife, Maria, nicked him in 2011 at a fiber optics convention she attended for work. He was one of the free giveaways at the General Photonics booth, which is embroidered on Little Charlie’s fuzzy chest. She feigned interest in their products just so she could get him. Maria brought him home around the time we started dating. She named him after Charlie Chaplin because she imagined him to be a rambunctious scamp. This is all noted in a short story I got published in Prairie Schooner.

For years, Little Charlie was like our pretend kid. Under the guise of our spirited little rascal, Maria would write me cutesy goofy notes and leave them on my backpack when I would wake up at her apartment before I would head home. In turn, I would slip notes from Little Charlie under the bathroom door when Maria was taking care of her business. I don’t know who started that, but it was a thing we did, and all the notes were in Little Charlie’s child-like scrawl with backwards Rs and misspellings (like “pikturs”). In our teddy bear epistolary, Maria was “mama” and I was “papa.”

The Barber (flash fiction)

photo by Phillip Pessar

It’s been three days since I’ve been sleeping on the floor of my barbershop. Laid out a sleeping bag and my pillow from home over the rubber mat I used to stand on all day. Never fucking thought I’d ever use it like a mattress. Or that I’d see the sun rise from my shop.

Janet kicked me out. Told me she doesn’t feel safe around me ‘cause of my boozing. All I’m doin’ is drinking and watching more TV than I probably should. It’s not like I’m getting tanked and goin’ out for a spin. Where the fuck could I even go? Everything’s closed up. Think she got tired of betting on me and seeing I’m not gonna pay out. Figured it’s time to cut her losses.

Few years back, the shop was doing good. I was raking in three hundred bucks whenever I opened. Got a nice leather armchair for the lobby and new checkerboard flooring to give it a vintage feel. In 2018, the local paper voted me the best barbershop in town. Almost all my clients were repeat customers. Everything was smooth going, but then my back gave out. Sciatica. All those years of working construction, going all out ‘cause I could back then. Now sometimes I can hardly walk or stand without pain shooting up my leg. Had to close up my shop until I got better. That’s when I lost a lot of customers.

(Nice Dream)

Chez Janou (Paris) by Guillermo Fdez

This morning I had a vision I didn’t want to wake from. I dreamt I stepped into a hipster-y Bay Area pizzeria for lunch. My subconscious applied the coronavirus filter: when I stepped into the small restaurant, I immediately peered around to see how many people were inside, how large the space was, and if people were wearing facial masks. And when the seater approached, I asked for a table and knew that I shouldn’t be in there because I have an unvaccinated child back home.

2021 First-Round NBA Playoff Predictions

Holy shit, the final game in the NBA’s new play-in tournament just went down at Chase Center, conjuring painful memories of another elimination game loss at home for my beloved Warriors, but now the NBA playoffs are upon us. This time around, I’m stealing a page from Zach Lowe’s excellent first-round playoff breakdown and grouping these series predictions by my level of interest starting with the series I am most excited about followed by the ones I don’t really give a shit about.

 

So let’s go.

Long Time Coming: My Top 10 Soundgarden songs

Since mid-March of the heinous year of 2020, I’ve been driving nearly every weekday with my wife and son to a home office at my in-laws’ house. As a result of this commute, we’re listening to the radio more often. When I have it tuned to the local hard rock station, songs from our high school epoch occasionally play, including classic hits from Soundgarden. When “Black Hole Sun,” “Fell on Black Days,” or “Outshined” plays, I still occasionally feel surprised to realize that I’m listening to a dead man. Chris Cornell was fifty-two when he died on May 18, 2017. He had outlived his troubled peers from that musical era, like Kurt Cobain, Layne Staley, and Scott Weiland. I guess his sudden death in a hotel room in Detroit right after a show still stuns me.

I saw Soundgarden headline for Metallica at Lollapalooza in 1996. The band was promoting Down on the Upside, their final studio album before their 1997 breakup. At age seventeen, I was still in the infancy of my love for rock. I was familiar with their music—namely Superunknown—but I was incapable of grasping just how fucking awesome they were. I hadn’t lived enough, nor listened to enough other bands and musicians to understand what might and virtuosity they contained with guitarist Kim Thayil, drummer Matt Cameron, bassist Ben Shepherd, and singer and songwriter Chris Cornell.

Pandemic Ride

 

There I was, standing in my closet, picking out a clean shirt and digging into a tote bag to find swim goggles for my first ride on public transportation since March. It was New Year’s Eve, 2020. My beloved in-laws—my angels throughout this pandemic—were grilling up steaks and chicken wings to mark the passing of this dreadful calendar year. Instead of staying home and waiting for my wife, Maria, and our son to return with leftovers, I thought it would be a righteous note to end the year by dining with them. No one else was coming to their house, and we were in each other’s COVID-19 bubble.

While I got dressed and ready, I had to pee twice. I also started to involuntarily cough. It had been a while since my nervous cough surfaced: the first weeks of the pandemic back in late March whenever I got ready for a weekly solo supermarket shopping trip.