It didn’t start out as social commentary.

It started out as a children’s book.

The title is, The Way to Dr. Bourru. And I wrote it in 1989. But it isn’t just a children’s book, it’s a children’s mystery—and a psychological one at that. It’s a tale that weaves its way through the park (now “The Park”) and its inhabitants to answer the question of why it seems that places that are farther away take less time to get to than places that are closer.

The main character is an Irish Water Spaniel named Watson and he spends the book trying to answer this question by interviewing different animals as they make their way toward the office of Dr. Bourru:

The way to Dr. Bourru’s office was usually a very long one and that was one of those truths that was always true and never seemed to need any adjustment for circumstances. That was one of the things about going to Dr. Bourru’s: it always took a long time but if you asked why, nobody would ever look at you and say, “because of circumstances.” There weren’t any circumstances on the way to Dr. Bourru’s; it was just a long way’s away, no matter where you were. Yet, in fact, the farther away you were to begin with, the less time it seemed to take you to get there. And no one had ever known the reason why that was so, but it was so, nonetheless.

A few of the characters in The Mammalian Daily were created in this book but, somehow, Watson did not make the cut. I don’t know why.

Next up: More on the creation of the characters