Life Lessons

Chatterduck is a book that I owned as a child and was reclaimed by me a couple of years ago when going through boxes of Mom's stuff. I brought it home to read to my children, and, in doing so, I thought it was surprisingly harsh for a children's book (it's old). But they liked it, so we've kept it in our collection and have continued to read it.

The premise of the book is that Chatterduck is a little duck that "says quack, quack, quack all day long." All the other animals on the farm grow quite tired of this and eventually the other ducks throw him out of the duck house and "poor chatterduck cries himself to sleep on a stump." He's back at it the next day, though, and so everyone on the farm and even some people from town conspire together to scare him quiet with a big "BOO!" It works and the book concludes by saying that from then on if Chatterduck has "something really important to say he just says, 'Quack.'"

I'm beginning to conclude that that was a moral that I took to heart as a child and that evidence of this is manifesting itself on my blog.....