THE MISSING PIECE

The journey, not the arrival matters. . . to the extent that once Silverstein's freehand circular "it" finds the pie-shaped missing piece it's been seeking all along, it decides to do without it—for when the wedge-like gap that had functioned as a sort of mouth is filled in, "it" is unable to sing. The whole fable bears more resemblance to a Pfeiffer cartoon than to the fat book it appears on the outside; the "mouth" and a dot for an eye are all that make "it" a creature of sorts, and there's nothing else on the bare white pages but the line it rolls along, the small scale butterfly, flower, etc., it encounters on the way, and the various other "pieces" it tries before finding the perfect one. However, the very childlike sparseness of words and lines at least leaves room for application without forcing any—and we'll take "its" approach to life over that of Silverstein's Giving Tree any day.