A good thing to know is what a punch in the nose feels like in case somebody asks

Maurice Sendak's tiny ink drawings of kids doing crazy stuff have always been some of my favorite illustrations. Like this one from Open House for Butterflies, with words by Ruth Krauss.

Final drawing for Open House for Butterflies. Pen and ink. © 1960 by Maurice Sendak.

It's true, I think.

Over the weekend, I rode my bike to the Rosenbach Museum & Library's Bloomsday celebration, winding along Kelly Drive and Schuylkill River Park, through the streets of Fitler Square and Rittenhouse, to Delancey Place - a street just made for a literature event. The museum - home to Sendak's collected works and far too much other neat stuff to list - celebrates Leopold Bloom's odyssey through the streets of Dublin with an all-day reading of James Joyce's Ulysses every June 16. This year, I made sure to take a Ulysses break and peek at Sendak's again work up-close. I was reminded of how much I liked this particular illustration style of his.

I was a Nutshell Kid.

My Sendak books are creased and tattered. My Really Rosie LP, overplayed. My VHS tapes of animated tales worn out, including a copy of the original Bumble-Ardy from Sesame Place (see below - its wild and everyone is drinking wine and I love it). I loved Pierre precisely because he didn't care, and couldn't believe Mickey got baked into a cake and lived to dream another dream. I still have a stuffed Wild Thing plush doll (Moishe, to be exact), think about what it would be like if my "ceiling hung with vines and the walls became the world all around." I know that Sendak's books, and other fantastical and progressive children's lit that my mom read to me until I fell asleep (or she did!) shaped the mind I have today.

The museum's latest exhibition Maurice Sendak: A Legacy is now on view through May 26, 2013. See it.

Bumble-Ardy's very exciting 9th birthday party: