Debbie's Reviews > Charlotte’s Web

This is some book!

This well-known classic kids’ book is all it’s cracked up to be. Charlotte is the nicest, wisest spider you’ll ever meet. Wish I could think of sweet Charlotte the next time I see a creepy crawly spider, but I’m sure the memory of her will go right out the window and I’ll run for my life, as always!

Everyone should read this book. Well, probably every one has. But true confession here: When my teacher read the book to our class over a few weeks, my 8-year-old self daydreamed off every time! Yep, that’s me: the attention span of a shoo-fly! How did I do this, I want to know, since now, reading it more than 60 years later, I was completely captivated.

I guess I wanted to give back what I didn’t allow myself to receive way back when: an amazing, heart-wrenching read! So I read the book to Eliska, the 10-year-old I kid-sit for. She had liked the movie so was up for a read-aloud. I did NOT appreciate it when, half-way into the story, she proudly blurted out the sad ending. The stinker—she knew what she was doing and she just wanted to see my expression—which, of course, was pure shock and dismay. She thought she was hilarious; I wish she had gotten the memo on spoilers.

There’s so much good about this story about two friends: a spider, Charlotte, and a pig, Wilbur. Talking animals, quite a trip. There are stuttering geese; a wise-guy rat. The best part was Charlotte writing in her web, in the hope that she could save Wilbur. I loved the words she chose and how she acquired them. Tickled me to death—so ingenious! A good lesson in the power of words, the power of language. The first thing Charlotte wrote in the web was SOME PIG.

WARNING: The rest of this so-called review is just a true story about the drama (seriously, not important drama) that occurred while I read this book. Proceed if you want, but I won’t be insulted if you ignore it.

While I read, Eliska always does some craft. Once she made rubber-band earrings that could have mutilated my ears, but luckily she warned me, and I removed them the second I left the premises. This time, she decided to give me a tattoo. Oh, she did ask first, as she dangled the tattoo pens in my face. When I hestitated, she assured me that the tattoo would wash right off. I nodded okay, and she went to town on my wrist. I figured the tattoo would be the size of a dime, but as I read about the fate of Charlotte and Wilbur, I saw out of the corner of my eye that it was a multi-colored flower the size of a post-it note. Hm—that thing is BIG! I agained ask if she was sure it would come off. This time her story changed a little. “Oh, in a couple of days, for sure,” she says. What??? It hits me that she has no idea whether it will come off! What have I let her do? Am I nuts? I subdued my freakout and kept my head inside Charlotte’s Web. How my reading voice stayed calm I do not know.

Eliska was done, and I have to say the tattoo was pretty. Next, she started going crazy painting her fingers with mulit-colored stripes. At first I thought they looked cool, but then I started seeing them through a mom’s (her mom’s) eyes and I realized they were pretty ugly—loud and bright brass knuckles, except they didn’t cover just the knuckles. Every square inch of her fingers was soaked in marker pen. It suddenly occurred to me that maybe mom would not appreciate the fact that I let her kid write all over her hands. Maybe I was in deep doo-doo. I started getting antsy and I asked Eliska, “Are you SURE these wash off?” She promptly went and washed off one finger and returned. Huge blue spots like bruises were what remained. It looked like she had USED the brass knuckles, for crying out loud. She giggled nervously as I gasped. “Well, if you scrub it with one of those hard brushes that you wash dirty nails with, more will come off,” she said. Like this would reassure me. We all know those brushes are nasty! Scrubbing my old wrist might scrub off the skin for all I know. We’re talking pain. And where to find such a brush in the first place? I don’t have one lying around.

Freakout time! At this point I was more worried about Eliska’s painted fingers than my tattoo. What if her mom was furious? What kind of babysitter lets a kid drench her skin with ink? Maybe Eliska liked this new look so much that she’ll become a badass when she’s 18 and cover her body in tattoos. Her mom will blame me for sure—the babysitter with no sense, the babysitter who was too busy reading Charlotte’s Web to notice the kid ruining her soft, clear skin with ugly ink.

Aha moment: maybe I should have had Eliksa draw graffiti on me that said, SOME BABYSITTER. Maybe instead of her mom being mad at me for letting Eliska loose with tattoo pens, she’d be impressed. Just like the world was impressed that Charlotte had written SOME PIG and it had saved Wilbur’s life.

Yep, maybe a SOME BABYSITTER tattoo would save my job. I threw the idea out to Eliska, who was in the middle of deciding whether her next finger should have three or four stripes. She thought I was nuts—what was wrong with the beautiful flower she painted? Writing words wouldn’t be any fun! And come to think of it, it depends on how you interpret SOME BABYSITTER anyway. If you emphasize the “some,” you could mean “that was SOME babysitter, alright. She was a humdinger!” (i.e., bad). So maybe it was best that I didn’t steal Charlotte’s idea after all.

It was the dad who came home and I didn’t see him notice Eliska’s hands. You better believe I was glad that it wasn’t mom who walked in that door. But I never heard a word about it. No news is good news. Eliska must have had an easier time removing the ink than I had thought.

What about my tattoo? When I got home, I looked at it a lot but I didn’t try to remove it right away. I was afraid that if I did, I’d have a blue blob, like Eliska’s painted finger. I was trying to ignore it so that I’d chill. It didn’t help when my husband glanced at my arm and said, “What? You got a TATTOO?” No way I could pretend it never happened. I told him the story, adding, “It will wash right off,” though I didn’t for a second believe it. He was so excited, he took pictures and sent it out to our daughters, “Look, mom got a tattoo!” It horrified me that it looked that real. If the tattoo looks so real, does that mean it’s permanent? I kept telling myself that there was no way that Eliska’s mom would allow her to have permanent markers in the house, no way.

I fretted—should I wait a few days before I tried to wash it off? No, that would be torture. I needed to know now. So after a few hours, I tried. And damn if the tattoo, the beautiful tattoo, didn’t disappear—completely. No scrubbing necessary, and no blue blob in sight.

You know, I’ll always think of the tattoo whenever I think about Charlotte’s Web. That was some book. Wilbur was some pig. I was some babysitter.