"Isn't it weird that I'm sad?" I just said to the first student to come in for a conference. "It's not like I knew him."
People who didn't know him are going to be all over the internet today, writing about him. I read Maurice Sendak's books too young to even know the change he made in my imagination. That's probably true for a lot of people who are now adults and for a lot of people who are now kids -- we've always known about the Wild Things, about the Night Kitchen, about gusto, menace, strangeness and beauty.
When I think of him I think about the flyaway hair on the little boy he drew most often.
This interview with Terri Gross (http://www.npr.org/2011/09/20/140435330/this-pig-wants-to-party-maurice-sendaks-latest) totally made me cry when I heard it in the car in September. It's kind of amazing.
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