Herein, your humble author engages in an amateur childhood psychology self-diagnosis ...

While drinking my morning cup of coffee today, I suddenly had a flashback of all sorts of different animals dressed in human clothing bustling around a cartoon town, some carrying ladders and others dressed in lab coats with stethoscopes dangling from their necks. They were all rushing back and forth throughout the dense, mixed-use streetscape in buses, cars, bikes, and walking in all directions. Every shopfront window in every building had some crazy scene on display, and the whole town seemed to be pulsating with life. Then (I have no idea how I did this) the name Richard Scarry just popped into my head. This was a Richard Scarry drawing.

I spent hours as a child pouring over Richard Scarry books, focusing in on every little detail and how it all seemed to hold together in one town. I wanted to be that construction worker on the scaffolding waving to the police officer walking by. In many ways this was an ideal vision of life in community and a well-functioning economy, and millions of children in my generation were captivated by these images. Sure the vibrant colors and fuzzy animals didn't hurt, but I can't help but think we saw something good about human society all thrown together in the jumbled diversity of "busytown."

For many years, I completely forgot about Scarry's utopian (but so normal) urban vision, but I suppose these crazy illustrations, that had tapped into my childhood pysche, may have left a lasting impression. Perhaps Scarry's world is not so unattainable after all. Except for the anthropomorphic mammals, of course.

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