Father's Day from Richard Scarry

These beleaguered-looking pigs played a big part in my childhood, as this story was one of my favorites. I was thrilled a couple weeks ago to track down the book that contained this illustration. The story it accompanies is "The Three Wishes," and this telling of it is found, it turns out, in Richard Scarry's Nursery Tales. I remember my dad reading this to me when I was a little kid, and I had wanted to find it for him for a long time. Something jarred the memory loose and made me think that it was, indeed, a Richard Scarry-illustrated book that I had been remembering, and just like that, the search was over. 

This story of the bickering husband-and-wife pigs and their three wasted wishes always made me hysterical, and these illustrations still got a laugh out of me when I reread the book this month. Look at the angry eyes of the shouting husband-pig above and the way Scarry's drawn him with the accusatory pointed hoof. :) 

And the crazed look in the pigs' eyes here as they try to wrestle the sausage off the wife-pig's real nose? That was the height of comedy to this five-year-old. I tried to get Mike to see the humor in these pages, but I seem to have been thirty-some years too late. Dad, however, should be delighted. I didn't mention in his Father's Day card that I had found it, but this book is one of the little presents I'm mailing him in his belated package tomorrow.   ♥