This is, without a doubt, my all-time favorite children's book. When my children were little (ages 5 to 9) beginning with my first way back in the mid-eighties, and continuing on through to my youngest somewhere between about 2007 and 2012, each of them (5 in all) loved this book. They would ask me to read it over and over. It is such a simple book with most pages containing only 2 to 10 words and 1 or 2 lines in parable form, some with none and only a drawing, and a few with more (but never more than 16 lines). And the pages are not even numbered. But the tender story it delivers is truly profound, with multiple levels of meaning, such that one can relate regardless of age. My Children proved this to me over and over, as I recall so many bed-time story nights when I would read to the youngest while the older children were busy with something else. Inevitably it seemed when the story was no more than halfway through the older ones would stop what they were doing and gather near to listen in. Wow! I call it amazing, a father's most cherished of memories. And now, like the old man in the story, I write this review, all of my children now grown, with tears in my eyes.
