“You know that book, The Giving Tree?” my daughter asked the other day. We were on our way home from her two-day class camping trip – a 9th grade tradition at her school.
“Yes….” I replied, warily. I do know The Giving Tree, Shel Silverstein’s bestselling 1964 picture book about a boy and the tree who loves him. We’d been given the book early on in our life as a young family, but I’d gradually become so disturbed at the type of relationship The Giving Tree modeled for my children that I’d expelled it from our bookshelves.
“Lil read it to us on the trip,” my daughter continued, “and I was crying so hard. It’s so sad; it’s like a metaphor for everything.”
“What touched you most about the book?” I asked.
“Well, at the end, the boy and the tree both have nothing left to give, but they’re just together….”
“That’s true,” I acknowledged. “What do you think that’s a metaphor for?”
“A lot of things. Parenthood.”
“Parenthood?!?” I yelped. “Do you plan to strip me of everything and then sit on my dead body?”
“Well you wrote once about how you should die slowly for the people you love!” she countered.
Not for the first time, I had mixed feelings about intelligent children who read my columns.
Click here to continue reading this week’s “Faith in Vermont” column in The Addison Independent.
The Pickle Patch 