C is for Cookie!

In honor of Sesame Street's 40th Birthday, I post the tribute of my hero, Cookie Monster, to his greatest love:


Sesame Street first came on when I was 2. My mother still tells me -- and by "still," I mean that she just wrote this in an e-mail to me -- of my 2-year old self sitting in front of the t.v. at my little pre-school desk with the magnetic top, placing my magnetic letters in a row and singing along as they called them out on the show. This was how I learned to read long before the schools would think to teach me.

Cookie Monster, of course, was my favorite. How can you deny the exuberant single-minded passion of that fuzzy blue monster? We should all have such purpose and joy!

My first car was a bright yellow Buick Skylark. "Lemon yellow," my dad said. "No," I replied, "Big Bird yellow." I got a little Big Bird figure and stuck him to the dashboard like a Jesus or St. Christopher statue. I liked to think of his gentle curiosity guiding my car on my wanderings about the city; and, of course, I adored his insistence on his friend, Snuffaluffagus, in the face of everyone else's jeers.

Keep on, Sesame Street! Teach more children about passion and trusting themselves and reading.