Welcome home, Shel.

Shel Silverstein, the late, great children’s poet, cartoonist, songwriter and friend of Hef’s, spent much of his adulthood in Greenwich Village, Key West, Martha’s Vineyard, Sausalito and Nashville, but Chicago was always his hometown. We proved it last night when a huge, diverse crowd of kids, hipsters and seniors packed the Millennium Park lawn to reclaim Silverstein’s legacy as our own.

Much of the night was devoted to Silverstein’s music–a side of him many fans of his poetry are less familiar with. Sally Timms, Will Oldham and The Bare Family Band performed the Grammy-winning songwriter’s music, including Cover of the Rolling Stone, Sylvia’s Mother and Hey Loretta. But the highlight of the night was Jon Langford’s rendition of the Silverstein hit made famous by Johnny Cash, A Boy Named Sue.

I grew up with Shel’s poems and books and have shared them with my two boys. Hearing Ken Nordine’s Kevin Coval’s fantastic reading of Sarah Cynthia Sylvia Stout Would Not Take the Garbage Out took me right back to Mrs. Scherer’s fourth grade class. Unlike schools today, no one was talking about recycling and saving the environment when I was a kid. But we had Shel and we had Sarah Cynthia Sylvia Stout. And thanks to them (and Mrs. Scherer), I grew up with a healthy dose of fear of a world where stacks of garbage (”curdled milk and crusts of pie, moldy melons, dried-up mustard, eggshells mixed with lemon custard, cold french fries and rancid meat, yellow lumps of Cream of Wheat”) grew so high it touched the sky.

Let’s keep the Shel-ebration going. What’s your favorite Shel Silverstein poem?