By Popular Request Ralphie’s Paw Notes

Ten Ways to Get More from the Prince Ralphie Book Series

Into the Land of the Clock-Watchers, The Bohemian Bookstore, and Kings without Kingdoms

1. The Clock-Watchers are the adults, they spend their time watching clocks and therefore can’t see unicorns, or dragons, or faeries, or snoods, or most of the rest of the enchanting creatures the kids can see.

   1. 1. 1. 1. Ralphie came from an enchanted forest; it is the enchanted forest of very young youth. It’s a place where your food and clothes and getting you to school on time just sort of happens magically … for most kids.

            2. Ralphie is raised by a single mother and is an only child, this goes to the heart of a single mother raising a boy without a male role model so that she builds a mythological backstory for his father that helps direct his footfalls ... in psychological terms it also goes to the sense of a child being both alone in the world and feeling special at the same time.

            3. In order to raise him with a value system without religious or ideological fetters she teaches him the Chivalric Code whose ultimate goal is to seek and find the Grail of legend and lore.

            4. The seeking of the Grail is a theme throughout the series; the Grail when drunk from refreshes the spirit of the seeker and allows him to “see” the world anew; as if “reborn” or “resurrected.”

            5. The Grail represents the “Transcendent” … and what you put in the Grail are the memories of your life, good and bad, and then you drink from it the wisdom of your life experiences ... their meanings and purposes, and therefore your heart, is calmed … and peace and beneficence comes from that “new” perspective.

            6. In-depth psychology: this is the letting go of the Ego and the embrace of something bigger than the “Self” … which becomes a call to individual service of the Greater Good. The literary question is “who does the Grail serve?”

            7. The overall theory of the books is that the individual does have agency in their life in spite of their individual beginnings or trials and tribulations, and this is demonstrated in the challenge of the two Knights in which one limps away, which is a theme explored in later stories in the series … the wounded healer.

            8. In keeping with the theme of the Fisher King—the Wounded Healer, who is wounded in the thigh, a wound that doesn't allow him to inspire fertility in his kingdom—Ralphie does meet him, but in his youthful naiveté he does not ask him the right question that would heal the King … thereby giving Ralphie the answer to the riddle of the meaning of the quests of Sir Percival

            9. Ralphie is Sir Percival, and the books follow the questing of the famous Knight that were first recorded by Chrétien de Troyes of twelfth century France who first put pen to parchment and recorded some of them … these stores are simply a continuation of those legends with its own legends ...