Our days are full of special moments, moments that most of the time go unnoticed and unappreciated. Today's picture book explores a sliver of time and shows a variety of incredible moments that take place in that fragment of a day.
The Silver Button
Bob Graham
Picture Book
For ages 4 to 6
Candlewick Press, 2013, 978-0-7636-6437-4
At one minute to ten on Thursday morning Jodie is drawing
a picture of a duck. She gives her lovely duck a top hat, a cane, and boots.
Carefully she draws silver buttons on his boots. She is just about the draw the
final button when her little brother, Jonathan, pushes himself to his feet for
the first time. He sways, he frowns, he tilts forward and takes his first step.
At that very
moment, in the next room, Jodie’s mother starts playing her penny whistle and a
feather from a pigeon nest under the roof drifts past the window “like an
autumn leaf.”
At that very
moment, little Alice next door mails sticks and stones through the front gate
and a jogger runs by. Not far away Bernard has his shoelace tied again, and a
soldier says goodbye to his mother. In the park Sophie and her granddad make a
house of leaves, and a homeless lady shuffles along, pushing a cart containing
all her worldly possessions. Just as Jonathan is taking that first step,
incredibly special moments, and everyday moments, are touching lives all over
the city where Jodie lives.
In this
wonderful picture book Bob Graham celebrates the precious moments that take
place every day. He shows us how, while Jonathan is taking that first
incredible step, all kinds of things are happening in the world beyond his
home. By degrees, Bob Graham’s art takes us further and further out from
Jodie’s home, allowing us to see her street, then her neighborhood, then the
city and the ocean. We come to appreciate that there is something rich in the
world he shows us. How incredible it is that his world is so much like our own.
Could it be that we too live in a world full of wonderful moments?
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