Twenty-one years later, the bookworm girl’s love for reading and books grew, too. Despite her unfaltering and ever-escalating passion for such, somehow she felt quite sad because she had yet to find a book that her heart and soul could call favorite.
Pam didn’t have a best friend. Rather, she had a greatest grandfriend named Dianne, the person she will share a perfect friendship with even when they both become old, gray, and wrinkly grannies. Incidentally, her greatest grandfriend also happened to be another bookworm girl.
It happened one night, amid phone marathons where greatest grandfriends talk about everything, anything, something and nothing. By a quirk of fate, Dianne recommended the books that became Pam’s favorite ones. However, she told her to just read them off the bookstore shelf but not buy them, because they were only short stories and fairly expensive. Months elapsed before Pam found the forever and a day out-of-stock books, as they seemed to tirelessly revel in the childish game of bookshelf hide-and-seek. She did read them off the shelf but she did not not buy them, not because they were the only stocks left and on sale even. That fateful moment when Pam held the published treasures in her hands and saw the magnum opus of simplistic text and squiggly illustrations with her eyes, she knew right then and there that she would love them with all her heart and cherish them with all her soul for the rest of her life. She knew with a knowing unlike any other that she wanted to read the books as often as she wanted to, and she wanted to read the books to her future children and grandchildren as often as they wanted her to.
Shel Silverstein’s The Missing Piece (1976) and The Missing Piece Meets The Big O (1981) may essentially be children’s books, but for the bookworm girl whose juvenile leisure pursuits include blissfully wandering about children’s sections in bookstores, she will never ever be too old for them. The books are much more than children’s books for her. They are greatest grandfriends’ mutual treasures, cuter-than-cute collectibles or coffee-table books, literary works of art, and timeless fairy tales not just for the little ones, but for the big ones, too.
The first book, The Missing Piece, is an enchanting fable about an almost-circle’s quest to find its missing piece. Because it was missing a piece, it felt incomplete and thus was unhappy. As the almost-circle rolled along in its search, it merrily sang a song it made up itself. At times, it procrastinated by baking in the sun, cooling in the rain, freezing in the snow, talking to a worm, smelling a flower, passing a beetle, and being passed by a beetle. It was the best time of all for the almost-circle. On and on it went, over oceans, swamps and jungles, up and down mountains. Many an instance of false alarms came about as the almost-circle thought it had found its missing piece, but it was too small, too big, too sharp, too square, and otherwise unavailable. Others seemed to be perfect, but the almost-circle either didn’t hold it tightly enough and lost it, or held on too tightly and broke it. So it went on still, having adventures and misadventures, until one day it finally found its missing piece and they fit together perfectly. At long last, it was a complete circle! But soon enough, it realized that its completeness meant it could now roll so fast that it could no longer procrastinate or sing songs the way it used to. In the end, it gently set down what it thought was its missing piece and happily rolled away… being itself.
The second book, The Missing Piece Meets The Big O, is an inspiring tale told in the missing piece’s point of view about its journey towards independence. Because it was left behind, it sat alone and was thus unhappy. As the missing piece patiently waited for someone to come along and take it somewhere, it encountered a lot of false alarms as well. One fit but could not roll, yet another could roll but did not fit. Others were unknowledgeable or unintelligible; while others too delicate, too reverent but negligent, too many missing pieces, or too many pieces. There were hungry ones, observant ones, and oblivious ones. The missing piece tried making itself more attractive but to no avail, and it also tried being flashy but turned out to be scary instead. At some point, it found a perfect fit! But alas, it was only short-lived for the missing piece all too sudden began to grow such that it could no longer fit into its supposed piece and eventually had to be left by it. The missing piece was alone again, and it was unhappy again. Until one day, it met The Big O, who was different. The Big O wasn’t a missing piece, nor was it a missing piece. It was a circle who could roll along wherever and whenever it wanted. The missing piece wanted to roll like the Big O did. At first, it thought it could not. But in the end, with a few flips and flops and a lot of inner resolve, it learned that it could. And away it rolled… by itself.
Really and truly it was love at first sight for Pam. She loved everything about the books – the black-and-white hard cover and pages that elicit a subdued elegance, the crude one-dimensional drawings that artistically mimicked a childlike scrawl so impossible not to love, and most of all, the brief phrases and basic sentences that tug at heartstrings and articulate the veritable truth in all its simplicity yet complexity.
Thought bubbles atop Pam’s Shel Silverstein-ed head contained a haphazard hodgepodge of contemplation, of how people in their tireless quest for perfect happiness go through lengths to fill the empty void in their lives, believing with each and every shard of their existence that they could find the nonexistent missing piece that would make them whole and make their lives complete. Be it the perfect relationship, the perfect career, the perfect family, the perfect fortune, or the perfect whatever, there was always a missing piece that encumbers people from leading the perfectly perfect life. She thought of how different people look for different missing pieces, and of how preposterous it was to think that there could ever be a perfect match seeing as there were too many different types of people and too many different types of missing pieces altogether!
Yet in the course of humankind’s indefatigable search for their missing pieces, they continue to sing songs and pass beetles, all the while making believe that they are unhappy and incomplete when they are actually already happy and complete. The fundamental paradox is that people spend their entire lifetimes searching for something they already have. When all’s said and done, it takes finding and losing the longed-for missing piece – not to mention all the false alarms in between – for people to realize that they have time and again been living out their yearned perfection.
More thought bubbles. She thought of how people overvalued their sense of belongingness and undervalued their sense of self-worth. How ludicrous it was to be born with two feet yet be incapable of standing on them by one’s self. This unsettling need to fit in somewhere, to be a part of something whole in order to be whole, to be in essence a missing piece, was downright disconcerting! She thought of how people in their unqualified desire to fulfill this need wind up trying so desperately to fit into pieces they could not really fit into. Like mismatched puzzle pieces. Like Cinderella’s glass slippers on her stepsisters’ feet. Like futile parking attempts in strictly no-parking zones. She thought of how sooner or later they have to pop out of whatever they have forcibly squeezed themselves into. Like a corkscrewed champagne bottle. Like too-tight bras that constrict rather than support. Like bubble gums blown on too much which explode in the face. She thought of how, if truth be told, people can in reality do whatever it is they set out their hearts to do. Independently, by themselves, without the need for any teensy-weensy bit of help from no one in particular.
Children will be children. Grown-ups will be grown-ups. But sometimes, grown-ups act like children. And sometimes they even think and speak like children. Most of the time, though, no matter how old they get grown-ups will always and forever be children at heart. Just like the no-longer-little bookworm girl named Pam who asked her greatest grandfriend Dianne to also own the Shel Silverstein masterpieces so that when one of their babies accidentally burp on the books someday, they can borrow each other’s copy.