Crooner Eddie

As I (Nonno, just arrived today for a short visit on my way to Italy) sit here listening to Eddie talk and sing himself to sleep, I suggest that he's going to be a crooner.  He is singing the ABC song, "The wheels on the bus go round and round," and other top hits.  His parents inform me that he is also a poet, quoting appropriate verses as the situation dictates.  On the way to Whole Foods he announces, "To market, to market, to buy a fat pig!" and on the way back he proclaims, "Home again, home again, jiggidy jig!"  When it rains, he commands, "Rain, rain, go away.  Come again another away.  Little Johnny wants to play."  In the park, when he saw kids playing, he intoned, "Boys and girls come out to play!"  Expanding his repertoire beyond nursery rhymes, when picking up his toy tiger he declaimed, "Tiger, tiger burning bright."

He has mastered tunes and memorized entire books.  In that he follows in the footsteps of his papa, who memorized "Are You My Mother?" when he was a pre-schooler and thus he could fool people by giving the impression that he could read.  Eddie fooled his father in a similar vein.  He, Eddie, loves to look at ads for books on the back cover of other book or in magazines.  I noticed this myself today, when I read one of the Kolya books to him (books we got for Kolya when he was a child starring him as the hero): Eddie pointed to the ads on the dust jacket, and I read the titles to him.  Well, when papa took him to the library recently, Eddie picked a book from the shelf and exclaimed, "The Pig Parade!"  Papa was amazed.  He had never seen the book and had never read it to Eddie.  He marvelled, "Whaaaat!  Can he read?"  It turned out that Eddie had seen the ad for the book when reading with mommy and she had read the title to him, and he remembered the cover.

Strangely enough one of the two Kolya books that grandma Subie sent to Eddie is titled "The Big Parade," and when nonno read the title, Eddie shouted, "The Pig Parade!"