The Poky Little Puppy (a wonderful string of words to say out loud) begins with one of the most powerful sentences ever constructed in the English language: “Five little puppies dug a hole under the fence and went for a walk in the wide, wide world.” This pretty much sums up experience, and as a plot, it’s the basis for a lot of great literature.

Written by Janette Sebring Lowrey and illustrated by Gustaf Tenggren, the book was first published by Simon and Schuster in their Little Golden Books series that came out in 1942. By 2001, The Poky Little Puppy had sold 15 million copies, and topped the best-seller list of hardcover children’s books in English. Perhaps it’s slipped since then — could be, especially with the ascendance of such brilliant writers and illustrators of children’s books as Maurice Sendak and Shel Silverstein. Yet somehow the poky little puppy story, plain as it is, packs a punch. There are even adults — I’m married to one of them — who have never managed to shake it from their psyches.

The story is simple and the drawings darling. There are a couple of moral lessons included: Do not cheat and do not be late. The Cliff Notes (in case you should ever have to take an exam on the book) read as follows:

“The poky little puppy repeatedly gets into trouble because he lags behind his four siblings when they dig a hole under the fence and keep going out to explore the hill beyond — an action explicitly forbidden them by their mother. At first, only the four who are not poky are punished for being bad, since the poky little puppy, being poky, arrives back home too late to be included in the punishment. By the end of the story, however, the poky little puppy faces some big trouble: The hole beneath the fence has been filled in (!) (by his siblings) and, he’s forced to squeeze his pudgy little self through the fence to get back inside. There he finds his siblings finishing up the strawberry shortcake their mother has left for them. He has to go to bed hungry. The book ends with a new sign posted by the fence that reads, ‘No desserts ever unless puppies never dig holes under the fence again!’”

Why the mere mention of the title of such a simple, lovely children’s story causes my husband to cringe is not hard to explain. When he was a little kid growing up in a small southern California version of Levittown, he would wander around the neighborhood playing cowboys and war with the other kids. He was chronically late in getting back home — even when he would hear his mother calling for him from the back porch. She used to like to say to him, “Some day your father and I are going to build a fence in the back yard.” Even at four, he knew the threat implied in those words: He’d be too little to climb that fence and get back home. When he kept on coming home late, his mother pointedly gave him The Poky Little Puppy.

I’d like to say that reading The Poky Little Puppy changed my husband’s behavior, but sadly, he turns out to possess a gene for lateness. Instead, the story left him a man who arrives chronically late to everything while always suffering a sense of urgency and worry about it.

If you like stories about leaving home, wandering the world, and then eventually making it back home, and you don’t have time to read Homer’s Odyssey, try The Poky Little Puppy. After all, it’s the same story, only a heck of a lot shorter.

(Brainstorm illustration incorporating a transformed photo by Flickr user MeaganJean)