Picture this: you are walking down a hallway at work. Coming toward you, from the other end of the hallway, is a colleague. Your eyes meet and dart away. You have already seen them that day and greeted them Good Morning but now what do you do? It would seem rude to walk past them without saying anything and yet you do not want to stop and introduce a work-related topic and interrupt them on their way to wherever they are going.

So you say, “Hello.”

And they reply, “Hello.”

And then it happens later in the day.

“Hello.”

“Hello.”

It is at moments like this that I sometimes liven things up with a literary reference, adding, “Do you like my hat?”

This usually causes confusion. Even when I worked in the book industry, this caused confusion. I can only blame gaps in my colleagues’ childhood libraries because anyone who has read this literary classic knows the right response.

“No. I do not.”

Or, alternatively, “I do! What a hat! I like it! I like that party hat!”

This book starts strong: “Dog.” An authoritative statement. Simple. Easy for a child to understand.

Then it expands to big dogs, little dogs, lots of dogs. These dogs are going places.

Then the dogs going places are interrupted by the George and Gracie humor of the two dogs discussing hats. Who are these two dogs? Why is the yellow dog so grumpy about hats? Why does the pink dog want the yellow dog’s approval anyway – who cares what the yellow dog thinks? You want to wear that hat, Pink, you wear it!

Then there are dogs on top of things and under things and in and out of things and on top of things.

And then there are dogs in cars. Dogs love cars. Dogs love riding in cars. They love chasing them. But did you ever imagine dogs driving cars? No?

But P.D. Eastman did. And children accept it. Because in children’s books, anything can happen.

The dogs are, to quote a character from MIrabile, tulip-colored: blue, yellow, green, red.

This caused some consternation in my home, when my parents selected our second dog. The first dog was mine, a Samoyed who arrived as a ball of white fluff on Christmas morning. The second dog would be my sister’s and she wanted a blue dog. So my parents selected a black lab and named her “Midnight Blue” – oh, the tears when we picked the dog up from the breeder’s. She was a wonderful dog.

But she was not the blue of the blue dog in Go, Dog. Go!

Incidentally, something I picked up on only as an adult is the subtlety of that title. I always refer to the book inaccurately as Go, Dogs, Go. But it’s not: it’s Go, Dog. Go! The punctuation makes the difference in how you say it. The difference between standing by the side of the road, cheering on the pack of speeding dog drivers – and chilling in a dark club, snapping your fingers along with the jazz quartet, expressing your appreciation with a subtle, yeah, go dog go – and directing a dog to go on, get out of here.

This book has motion – dogs going around and up and down. It has character. (The smugness of the dog who states, “It is not hot here under the house” is priceless.) It has a comic relief. It has quiet moments (“Now it is night.”).

And it has suspense. Where are those dogs going in all those cars? Why are they driving so fast? What are they going to do? Why are they climbing trees? You have to wonder.

And the answer is priceless.

Every small child I have given this book to has forced me to read it to them over and over and over again. And the language, the images stick with you. Even years later. Don’t buy this book for your kids unless you like reading books over and over and over and over again.

Without P.D. Eastman, there would be no pigeons driving busses. There would be no pig and elephant. P.D. Eastman launched this type of book, with simple, colorful art, absurd situations (why would a pigeon want to drive a bus anyway? because dogs get to drive cars?), stories that are easy to understand but also compel you to keep reading, and simple language that provokes kids to read, and language that makes it easy for parents to get reading aloud right.

“Good-by!”

“Good-by.”