Grandfather Frog Stays in the Smiling Pool

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A copy of "Grandfather Frog Stays in the Smiling Pool", written by Thorton W. Burgess in 1914, sits on top of a dresser. Besides the black sketch of Grandfather Frog sitting on his Lily Pad wearing a suit jacket and top-hat, the cover is a faded brown made up of visible criss-crossed fibers. It has an aged look, the cover lacks the boisterous colors, plastic outer cover, or computer generated graphics that characterize many of the books written in the past few decades. Its binding is loose, the corners of the cover are damaged with the fibers slightly unraveling like yarn in a woolen sweater, and its pages are creased and have some slight tears. The nearly 100 pages of the book are filled with more than noticeably large print and illustrations of Grandfather Frog and his other friends from the smiling pool have been illustrated on most of the pages by Harrison Cady.
The name Charles Brunnert is scrawled on the inside cover in an obviously childish cursive hand that contains glimpses and aspects of the elegant style that characterized the early 19th century. Charles Brunnert, my grandfather, received this as a Christmas gift when he was a child in the 1920's. It was the first book that he learned to read with the help of his mother Regina, the teacher at the one room school house in Argyle, MO. The words of the book and its images and stories of grandfather frog and his friends' adventures were some of the first to fill his mind.
Nearly 70 years later, when I was a child. The images and stories that fill this old brown covered book were the first that I read as well. I spent the summer with him and my grandmother the year before kindergarten helping/annoying them complete the simple tasks I was given on the farm. After the first few weeks, my grandfather decided that I was at the age where I should no how to read. "Grandfather Frog Stays in the Smiling Pool" was the first book he grabbed off the shelf, and we spent the rest of the summer evenings sitting in his chair letting Grandfather Frog teach me how to read just as he had taught my grandfather many years before.