Frank Davenport

July 20, 2009

Dear Mr. Pinkwater,

I have just started reading five novels to my eight year old son, and he is enjoying himself tremendously. I read three chapters to him tonight, and he was begging me to continue. I could only get him to sleep with the promise of reading more tommorrow morning when he wakes up.

I was overwhelmed with emotions after leaving him, as my mother read these same stories to me and my sisters as we were growing up, and I loved every minute of them. And why not? Your books are filled with characters who seem taken straight out of my own childhood. I have personally consumed red death chili at some wild bacchanal parties in the late seventies when I was just a boy, and your stories and their characters make me feel right at home. I am thrilled that my little boy can enjoy them too.

Your book transported me tonight back to a magical part of my past, and I just wanted to thank you from the bottom of my heart. From a 41 year old man who once was a little boy from Barrytown, who was carried in diapers the ten miles of so to the second day of Woodstock by his father, and who had larger than life neighbors all around him that were truly Kings of Men. Many are gone now, but they are living onward somewhere deep and sacred in my heart. I still have no idea what this life thing is really all about, but I can tell you this. The amazing stories you tell and the true magic that they hold are resonating through my family, from my mother to me and my sisters and down to my children, and that matters, in a real and meaningful way. I praise you with great praise. Thank you.

Did you know that I once lived in Barrytown for a summer, and knew some of those great people? Thanks for your kind words.