e underlying meaning. In fact, I know he did.Shel Silverstein's "The Giving Tree" was recommended to me a couple of years ago, when Sava was still an infant, and I only recently got it from the library, without consulting the content very closely. Once I had leafed through it, before offering it to Sava, I concluded that there was no way a three-year old would be willing to get through the whole thing.
The book tells the story of a little boy who loves a tree, climbs it, eats from its apples, sleeps under it. The tree loves him back. As he grows older, he comes back to the tree less and less frequently, which makes the tree sad, and each time he has a request--for money, for a house, for a boat--to which the tree responds by letting him gather its apples, cut off his branches, take the trunk to make a boat. In the end, the little boy comes back as a shriveled old man who needs only peace and rest, and the stump of the tree, which is the only thing left from it, gladly offers itself as a place for rest. The tree is happy. The boy does not seem exactly happy, but he is thankful.
The book is black and white, with pictures that look more like cartoons. It is bare of both drawings and words--at least in its first pages--which I suspect appeals to Sava. He especially seems to like the initial pages, which describe the loving relationship between the boy and the tree. We read the book four or five times today. During our last reading, right before bed, Sava asked me after a sentence about time passing, "Mommy, what is time?" I tried to explain to him that between waking up each day and going to bed at night there is a lot of "time" in which we do things. I wasn't exactly proud of my explanation.
During nap earlier, Dad listened to us reading the book on the baby monitor, and I came into our room to the sight of him red-eyed from crying. He finds the book irresistibly moving, which I in turn find irresistible about him.
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