You don’t have to be a psychoanalyst to appreciate that in its benign aspect, children’s literature is all about wish-fulfillment. In I Wear Pajamas All Day Long, the little child, who represents all children, makes this clear when their opening words are: “I wish for just one day I could do things my own way.”
In childhood we get our first taste of altered states – spinning ourselves into dizziness, looking through our legs at a topsy-turvy world, climbing everything in sight, falling down at whim, and, among many other things, submitting to the tickles, twirls, and gyrations adults delight in inflicting upon us. But when we want to do things our way, more often than not we are stymied by our caretakers.
If they were given the freedom to do whatever they want to do, the little child in this story would wear pajamas all day long, never go to bed, paint their room red, wear gloves on their feet, put socks on their hands, build a castle in the sea, swim on sand, crawl up a slide, make one plus one equal three, wear a bowl as a hat, call a pig “kitty cat,” read their books upside-down, wear only one shoe, yell “moo” at a horse, eat soup with a fork, cut toast with a spoon, howl out at the moon, grow up to be a clown, and walk upside-down.
It has been a long time since this septuagenarian experienced the ups and downs of childhood, but the little kid’s playful fantasies seem pretty attractive to me, and I’m sure they will be attractive to young readers as well. They should also be attractive to adults, who need to be reminded that there are other altered states beside those induced by Chardonnay or the like. As William Blake observes, “If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to [us] as it is, Infinite.” We have closed ourselves up, he says, till we see all things through the bars of our self-imposed cells.
When left to their own imaginations, children are adept at cleansing the doors of perception and escaping the prison house of normality, in this case through humour and fun. The book delivers its comic vision in rhyme and meter, which makes it pleasing for a speaker to recite and easy for a listener to remember. And this retired English professor is delighted to observe that the poetry scans perfectly and the diction, syntax, and structure are not only simple and age-appropriate but also artful and uncondescending. Children know when they’re being talked down to. This book respects their nascent sensibilities.
The illustrations by Hiruni Kariyawasam are brilliant. Each of the little child’s wishes is given its own page. The visual reinforces the verbal, and vice versa. The book ends by addressing its readers directly – “What would you do if you could do whatever you want for one day?” – and by furnishing them with a blank page to describe or draw a picture of a silly thing they would do.
The author of this book, Tom Scanlan, is nothing if not active. He has written seven elementary and secondary textbooks on urban geography, 83 letters to the editor, and numerous feature stories that have appeared in our city’s newspapers. As director of is five Communications for 43 years, he provided communication services to more than 50 Canadian charities. He has also broadcast baseball scores at Leaside’s Talbot Park for over a decade.
His wife, Sharon, is responsible for the elegant design of I Wear Pajamas All Day Long. She and Tom are the hosts of the Hidden Gems Toronto Podcast (hiddengemstoronto.net), now in its fifth season. Tom says they wanted to give back to the city they love. They continue their “quest to shine a light on fascinating people and places that fly under the radar but are a vital part of our city’s fabric.”
All these accomplishments aside, Tom and Sharon derive their greatest joy from their three adult children, the partners of their children, and the seven grandchildren with whom all of them have been blessed. His grandchildren, Tom says, were the inspiration behind his first foray into fiction. The holiday season approaches, and if you are interested in purchasing this wonderful book, it is available at one of our most-loved local bookstores, Mabel’s Fables on Mount Pleasant Road.
This article was guest contributed by Greig Henderson.