I’ve told Jill, official oldest daughter of NewMexiKen and the mother of three boys, that I intend to get the book Knucklehead: Tall Tales and Almost True Stories of Growing Up Scieszka
Scieszka gets children, and he gets their humor. Especially boy humor. He tells the truth about what really goes on when parents aren’t looking. (Chapter 34, “Fire”: “There is something about boys and fire that is like fish and water, birds and air, cats and hairballs. They just go together.” Good thing Scieszka’s mom was a nurse.
The book’s design is also inviting. There are 38 chapters of two to three pages each, with titles like “Who Did It?” With the timing of a stand-up comedian, Scieszka writes in “Watch Your Brothers”: “That’s what my mom used to tell me and Jim — ‘Watch your brothers.’ So we did. We watched Jeff roll off the couch. We watched Brian dig in the plants and eat the dirt. We watched Gregg lift up the lid on the toilet and splash around in the water.”
As someone who grew up with three brothers, I am familiar with boy knuckleheadedness. Scieszka makes the case for certain truths of boyhood, like why nothing beats a good game of “slaughter ball.” “One guy would throw the football up in the air. The rest of us would try to catch it. Then once you caught it, you had to run around and try not to get ‘slaughtered’ by everyone else. It was a great game because you got to smash into a lot of people and then end up in a giant pile.” Did you know it takes only seven pounds of pressure to break a collarbone?