While Maurice Sendak, who...

...died yesterday at age 83, was probably better known for writing Where the Wild Things Are, I remember reading In the Night Kitchen to my sons -- over and over -- when they were little. I never quite understood it; but the boys really seemed to like it.

The story, in case you're not familiar with it, is about a boy named Mickey who hears a racket in the night, gets out of bed and falls through the dark -- and out of his clothes, somehow -- into the "light of the night kitchen." Once there, he encounters three bakers -- who all look oddly like Oliver Hardy -- and finds himself mixed in cake batter. Put in the oven, Mickey pokes out his head and says, "I'm not the milk and the milk's not me -- I'm Mickey!" (Which is an odd thing to say.) He then skips into bread dough and shapes it into an airplane of sorts. And while the bakers are chanting, "Milk, milk ... for the morning cake," Mickey takes off in the plane. He jumps out, however, and sinks into a giant milk bottle saying, "I'm in the milk and the milk's in me. God bless milk and God bless me." Then he swims to the top pouring milk from his cup into batter below. The bakers then mix it and beat it and bake it, saying, "Milk in the batter, milk in the batter. We bake cake and nothing's the matter." Mickey then -- inexplicably -- cries "cock-a-doodle-doo," and slides back into bed, "cake-free and dried." And that's why, we're told -- thanks to Mickey -- we have cake every morning.

But we don't have cake every morning (at least not at our house) and so I never understood the story. (I've never been very good at fiction; I guess I'm just too literal). And I never knew quite how to read it, either. But, as I said, my boys used to love it, and so I read it to them at bedtime many, many times.