MOOSE GOOSE AND LITTLE NOBODY

One day a big wind blew. Trees fell and a gas pump flew. From somewhere a red roof spun through the air and came down with a BUMP!" From that relatively straightforward introduction Raskin launches into one of her nonsensical plays on the sound and sight and independent existence of words. The gas pump and red roof (the latter, really a sort of detached attic, inhabited by a young mouse) land effectively in the laps of a moose and a goose — who, reading the sign, decide that their small visitor must be a gas. ("Hello Gas.") Mouse's protests (he thinks he's a Moose, but the others know better) send all three on a search for his mother, his house and his name, and different signs and structures along the way suggest to Moose and Goose that the mouse is a lion, a phone, a bus, a mail and a stop. (This last is Goose's conclusion, though Moose argues, "No, no, his name is Go.") Children, more in touch than literate adults are with words as physical objects, will probably find all this funnier than we do — but it's justified at any level by the turnabout that follows: when the three finally do come to a small, roofless red house complete with waiting mother, Goose and Moose are sure that their friend is a snow — an error easily understood when you see the arrow-shaped sign labeled "mouse" turned upside down, and easily remedied when the now happy mouse, no longer a nobody, turns it right side round. Demonstrating not only the satisfaction of having a home, a mother, and an identity and the importance of words in providing the last of the three, but proving also Raskin's ability (less evident in Who Said Sue and Moe Q. McGlutch) to inform her silly situations and crisp, witty pictures with some unobtrusive psychological substance.