My Favorite Bedtime Story

The Blue Nosed-Witch by Margaret Embry was my favorite bedtime and anytime story as a child. I asked for it repeatedly. I requested it so much that once it got near to Halloween (Not sure how close, but to me it felt like eternity.) I was rationed to wait for Halloween to hear it. This meant that both my parents and all my siblings (I am the youngest of five.) were tired of reading this book. If only there had been audio books back then, I am sure my parents would have invested in a copy and headphones.

The pictures in the book are gray scale drawings not the color pictures of today’s picture books, yet I found something in that story that made me want to learn to read. I wanted to read that book to myself. Before I knew what a goal was, The Blue-Nosed Witch was the reward for struggling through Dick and Jane books to learn to read the story that had caught my imagination.

I haven’t read this story in years until today. It brought back happy memories and it is a chapter book rather than a picture book. It is the story of a habitually late young witch with a blue nose that goes trick-or-treating with human children one Halloween due to both she and a friend setting her alarm clock ahead to ensure she will be on time for Halloween. This story I loved both as a preschool child then a frustrated child learning to read in early grades, lead to a lifelong love of reading.

One summer I was excited to learn we would be going to visit Margaret Embry while on our vacation. My dad and the author of my favorite book were childhood friends and I believe distant relatives. (I would have to verify this with a sister or two.)

I asked about Mrs. Embry and heard of some of my dad’s childhood exploits. The one that stuck with me was how my dad sent the young Margaret a vial of skunk scent sealed with nail polish, at her request, through the US mail. (Scary what the mail may contain. I am sure if the mail carriers had known they would not have been pleased.)

I remember we stayed at Margaret Embry’s home, she was nice, had a dog that she taught to “count” bark and baked round loaves of bread. The dog trick and the unusual bread impressed me at that age. So, after we returned home, we talked my mom into making the novelty round bread for a while. I never taught my own dog the trick.

The feeling of meeting my favorite author and realizing that books are created by pleasant, regular people reinforced the joy of my favorite book. I loved that story weather I ever met the author or not. It was the first book that came alive and wasn’t just work learning. It was the handle I could grab that opened the door to the ability of all books to transport the reader or listener to other experiences. Books of all kinds inspire, open minds to new ideas and worlds. They connect people. I treasure the memories of sitting on my mother’s lap in the rocking chair with her trying to read me to sleep for a nap and falling asleep instead. (I so understand that now.)

Picture books and bedtime stories especially are a key component of childhood. The stories of childhood invite a child to exercise imagination and fly with a young blue-nosed witch, hear a Who with Horton, follow a hungry caterpillar, go to dance class with Ellen Tebbits, walk through a wardrobe to Narnia, and infinitely more adventures. I hope all children find a book that catches their interest and opens the world of books and the movies they make in our minds for them.