Once Upon a Time, There Were Three Fierce Robbers...

Hey Readers,

I usually try to post something every couple of weeks at least, and I had honestly hoped this post would be written about a week and a half ago. However, my life's been pretty crazy lately for better, and for worse. I spent a week touring Paris and Amsterdam, which was a lot of fun, and what I expected my next entry to be about. However, on the last day of the trip, I learned that my oma (the Slovenian word for grandmother), who was a huge presence in my life and an incredibly positive influence on who I am today, was terminally ill, and so I flew home as fast as I possibly could to say goodbye and attend her funeral. In short, it's been kind of a tough time lately. I hope to write an essay or a post or a short story in the near future to honor her memory, but for now, I'd like to turn to another special part of my childhood, and hopefully yours too: bedtime stories.

I was lucky enough to be the an only child for nine years, and to be the first grandchild on my dad's side, so both my parents and my grandparents spent a lot of time with me, and I have a lot of happy memories of our experiences together, whether it was a picnic in the backyard, a day in the library, or a week in Scotland. Everyone in my family reads a lot, and as soon as I was old enough to pay attention to a book, before I could even read it, they were reading to me. My mom and I would go to the library at least once a week, bringing home two or three big cloth bags (the kind environmentally conscious people use for groceries now) full of library books, most of which were picture books for me. Because we read a new book almost every night, we must have gone through hundreds of picture books a year, and I still remember some of the characters and stories: Max and Ruby, sparkly-scaled heroic fish, Mike Mulligan and his Steam Shovel, various myths from cultures across the world (a particular favorite for my oma), Eric Carle, Love You Forever, and Harold and his purple crayon, to name a few.

Did you read this as a kid?
Read it now and try not to tear up a little.

As I got older, we transitioned to larger chapter books, and my dad and I read The Time Machine and The Hobbit, while my mom and I read Matilda and McBroom's Wonderful One-Acre Farm.

Over 100 years later and this is still great sci-fi.

My mom still has a book of 365 stories - one for each day - when she was a child, and we used to read the story that would accompany each other's birthdays on that day. Mine was about a boy who wanted a place in the yard where he could dig holes, and my mom's was about a family that can't decide if they should paint their house blue, yellow, or red, so they mix the paint together and paint the house a beautiful shade of brown (my mom didn't think that was the best idea, but she liked the story anyway). The stories sound kind of silly and mundane now, but as a kid, it was a special part of my birthday, up there with birthday cake and my favorite dinner.


My favorite bedtime story, above all, was and will always be The Three Robbers, by Tomi Ungerer.

I fully expect to read this to my children
and my grandchildren someday.

My dad read this book so many times to me that I can still quote large parts of it verbatim, even though it has been over a decade since he last read it to me. It begins, as does the title of this post, "Once upon a time, there were three fierce robbers." My dad would always read this in a deep and foreboding voice. The book goes on to describe the robbers: "The first had a blunderbuss. The second had a pepper blower. And the third had a huge, red, axe." I first heard this story before I could read, so of course I had no idea what a "blunderbuss" was (I thought it was some kind of scary flashlight), or what good a pepper blower was for, but I understood the axe. The author describes the robbers as "fierce", and I liked that a lot as a kid.

I could go on, page by page, but basically, every night, the robbers descended from their mountain lair, stop caravans by blowing pepper in the horses' faces, then they threatened the passengers with the blunderbuss, smashed the wagon wheels with the axe, and then took all of the loot back up to their home high up in the mountains. One night, they stopped a coach that only has "an orphan named Tiffany. She was being sent to live with a mean aunt" (The book never explains why the aunt is mean, just that she is). The robbers, unsure of what to do, stuck to their general mission and took her back to their lair and gave her a bed. When she woke up, she saw all of their stolen valuables ("What riches!", she exclaimed), and asked what they do with all of it. "The robbers coughed and sputtered. They never thought of spending their wealth." Eventually, the robbers decided to trade in their wealth to create a home for orphans. "Dressed in red caps and capes", the orphans came to live with the robbers, who quit their lives as highway men and took care of the children. After the robbers died, the children still remember them fondly, so, "they built three, tall, high-roofed towers, one for each of the three robbers."

My dad was (and is) kind of silly at times, though he would always deny it by saying, "What? I'm always serious," and so he would change the words to books at times into obviously ridiculous things. One night, when I was three, we were reading The Three Robbers before I went to bed and he started messing with the story. I shouted, "No, Dad! Read the real words!" and when he insisted that those were the real words, I took the book from him and began to read it aloud to him to prove that I knew the real words. It was then that both I and my parents realized I could read.

This would have marked the end of an era for my dad, where he would have to read each book exactly as written, but he is more creative than that, and The Three Robbers had become important for both of us. From then on, every story he read me, even when we would be reading a chapter of something like The Hobbit, began with the same routine:

Dad: "Once upon a time, there were three fierce robbers."

Me: "Daaaad! Read the real words!"

Dad: "Oh, sorry."

And then he would proceed to dive right in to whatever the actual story for the night was, without skipping a beat. At the end of every book or chapter for the night, the ending was the same too:

Dad: "And they built three, tall, high-roofed towers, one for each of the three robbers."

Me: "Daaaad! That's not what it says!"

And my dad would laugh, tuck me in, and say good night, without fail. The other regular readers in my life had their rituals too - my mom would put in a folk music cassette tape (which helped me sleep) and tell me she loved me, and my oma would kiss me on the cheek and say, "sweet dreams," and these are both special in their own way too, but my dad's routine has stuck in my head above all.

Even now, when I read, sometimes when I finish a long book, I get this weird sense that it isn't quite finished. So, I say to myself, "and they built three, tall, high-roofed towers, one for each of the three robbers," and the book feels more complete. Maybe it sounds like a silly childhood ritual, but for me, it's a part of who I am as a reader.

Cheers!

...

And they built three, tall, high-roofed towers, one for each of the three robbers.