“Please don’t go! We’ll eat you up, we love you so!”

Maurice Sendak, who abhored being known as a “kiddie book writer” was one of my lifelong favorites. We all know and love Where the Wild Things Are. What touched me most this morning was reading an excerpt of a letter Sendak had saved from one of the children who loved his work:

{via NYT.com}

“Dear Mr. Sendak,” read one, from an 8-year-old boy. “How much does it cost to get to where the wild things are? If it is not expensive, my sister and I would like to spend the summer there.”

So from me, and from all of us at elephant:

“Dear Mr. Sendak, I hope you are now living where the wild things are. Your words will live on as we read them to our children and recount them to each other. For after all, you didn’t just write for children. You wrote for all of us that make this kind of mischief and that and won’t behave. You wrote for all of us that get lonely and want to be where someone loves us best of all. You wrote for all of us that have a wild thing inside. You wrote for all of us. Let the Wild Rumpus start!”