Friends, my novel Telephone of the Tree has received three starred reviews so far and is an Amazon Best Book of the Year. If you know a young or not-so-young person who might be comforted by it, please respond and let me know why and I’ll enter their name in a drawing for a free signed copy. 

I keep trying to write about why competition bothers me, how if someone’s a winner then someone else must be a loser, how sometimes I’ll secretly and intentionally lose a board game if I know it’ll make someone else happy, but the truth is the thing that keeps coming to me when I read this poem is the week my siblings and I spent every summer at our grandparents’ farm in downstate New York.

The red barns and weeping willow and white birch and porch swing. Our grandfather in coveralls, washing up at the laundry sink with Lava soap. Our grandmother driving us to Rudd Pond to go swimming. Both of them taking us all on a long country drive after dinner that would end up at Dairy Queen. How my grandmother always tried to get me to order more than a small vanilla cone – Oh honey, just that little cone? Can’t we get you a sundae instead? How my sister cried at the end of those summer weeks, because nothing in the world was like time spent with those two people: their laughter, their love, their absolute acceptance.

Hug o’ War, by Shel Silverstein

I will not play at tug o’ war.
I’d rather play at hug o’ war,
Where everyone hugs
Instead of tugs,
Where everyone giggles
And rolls on the rug,
Where everyone kisses,
And everyone grins,
And everyone cuddles,
And everyone wins.

Click here for more information about Shel Silverstein. Today’s poem is included in his collection Where the Sidewalk Ends, published by Harper & Row in 1974.

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