Houston Southard
a name that looks so fake you'll care just as little to learn it's not
Curiosity Killed The Chimp
My mom claims the first children's books she read to me were The Adventures of Curious George, tales of a monkey caught by The Man with the Yellow Hat who took him from Africa to America where the two would live together and become friends. I saw myself in George as much as she saw George in me, always climbing, ever scheming, and her retellings remember those story nights as fond bonding times.
A day before her birthday she shared a photo of the 75th Anniversary Complete Adventures of Curious George compendium that she was going to give my second cousin as a baby shower gift. To which I replied:
A good choice with a curiously-inaccurate title. "The Complete Adventures of Curious George"? Call me curious, but unless this edition also contains Cecily G. and the Nine Monkeys, it is in fact incomplete.
Authors Hans and Margret grew up at the turn of the 20th century next to a zoo outside of Hamburg, but didn't meet up until the mid '30s in Brazil. Hans was selling bathtubs. Margret had absconded from that sweltering hometown Nazism since being jewish had gone out of fashion. Crazy what a hundred years can do am I right! The tables turn and we sigh watching the disgusting circle of history.
Anywho, the two got married and moved to Paris where Hans got the attention of a French publisher who liked his cartoon giraffes in the newspaper. He funded Hans' first children's book in 1939 about a giraffe and the 9 newly-homeless monkeys she befriended after losing her family to zoo poachers. One of those monkeys was named George. Cecily needed a family, and mother Pamplemoose and her 8 chimps needed a home, which Cecily welcomed them into. She let the monkeys sleep in her long bed, use her as a slide, a ski slope, a sailboat, and even a harp! When her house caught fire one day, clever George climbed her neck like a ladder - hose in hand - to douse the flames.
George was made famous by a story about lost souls fostering fellow lost souls, an analogy surely not lost on Hans as he and Margret rode makeshift bikes four days to reach the French-Spanish border and escape enslavement. They left their entire lives to survive the holocaust, taking only their clothes, some bread, and five manuscripts that would eventually become the now globally-famous adventures of Curious George.
A fraught four day Tour de France only works if you know how to read the night sky. It was kismet, then, that Hans grew up an amateur astronomer during World War I redrawing cryptic constellation diagrams to make them more intuitive than their original namesakes. In 1952 he released The Stars: A New Way to See Them, a book quickly adopted into scientific astronomy guides. Gemini now resembles a set of twins, Ursa Major a bear, Leo a lion, and Virgo - well - a vulva, I guess. A man guided by the light, helping make things make sense, leaving a legacy to help others better find their way through the dark.
There's no doubt I was always George, but I think both me and my mom thought of her as the Man with the Yellow Hat. Turns out that she was Cecily G all along. As George's brother Punch so eloquently told Cecily, "It is quite complicated to be a giraffe."
Happy Birthday, Mom.
Yours incorrigibly,
Houston