Jeannette McCurdy was a checkered garter snake. She lived in our backyard until this morning, when she was discovered deceased on the neighbor’s driveway.
Before her untimely demise, Jeannette looked something like this:
She was a lovely little snake, with a nice yellow stripe down the middle of her back. She was about 10 inches long. We don’t think she made it to full adulthood.
My children gathered with their neighbors (also 8 and 6) to put Jeannette to rest. First, they determined she was a girl. Then they named her. Then they chose a resting place in a flowerbed. Then, while wailing loudly, they gathered flowers and other decorations to mark her gravesite.
Finally, they added a headstone with her initials on it:
After that, they went inside to eat and visit, which is what one always does after a funeral.
I tried a new voice on as I read to the kids today. The character is called Constance Contraire, and she’s supposed to be a cranky, little thing. I decided she needed to sound nasal and annoying.
My six-year-old stopped me after the first line. “Who is Constance?” she asked. I explained that she was the character we had just read about.
She looked shocked. “My God!” she exclaimed, “she sounds like that?!”
After I stopped laughing, we worked together on an acceptable voice. So much for creating characters on the fly.
I *love* reading to my kids. We read intermittently over the summer, but I’ve decided to do nightly reading now that school has started. We wait until Dad is home and read as a family.
He plays Angry Birds on his iPhone and listens. Or surfs Craigslist for Corvettes. And listens.
He can multitask. I’m bad at that. I can’t even listen to the radio while I drive.
Reading to the kids used to bore the heck out of me until several years ago when I got smart enough to dump the repetitive picture books and pick up children’s novels instead. I do very theatrical readings, which is ironic because I always sucked at theater. (Is that ironic in the Alanis Morissette sense or in the literary sense? I always get those confused.)
Children’s novels are a good fit for my style. They’re generally not very subtle. Over-emoting is encouraged.
Here’s the weird thing, though: after interpreting characters on the fly for years (I never read ahead because then it would be boring) I’m becoming good at it.
I’ve had my challenges this summer. Make up melodies for the written lyrics that Pa plays on his fiddle in Little House? No problem. Alternate between a male American narrator and a female British narrator in Rick Riordan’s The Red Pyramid? Nailed it. Keep 20-odd characters in that novel straight, including accents from the American South, the Middle East, Germany, France, and Russia? Exhausting, but done. And trust me, if I miss one, the kids call me on it.
We’re reading this one now, a book I picked up purely because of its cover:
I’m a sucker for any children’s book that reminds me of Edward Gorey, the brilliant 20th century Gothic illustrator. This one has the added benefit of being a puzzle book, á la The Westing Game, a childhood favorite of mine.
It’s so much fun. We’re three chapters in, and we’ve got a mysterious and quirky puzzle plot that has all four of us guessing, plus five distinct characters to voice so far. (Sticky Washington is my favorite to voice — my version of him has a slight Spanish accent that’s soft and lilting and makes every statement into a question.)
The kids hang on my every word, and even though I know it’s the story that rivets them I feel like I’m a part of it too. I get to inject my own creativity into each book. That’s really gratifying.
One thing I’m learning as an aspiring writer: reading aloud exposes bad dialogue very quickly. Luckily we’re not having that problem with this novel.
School started Monday. I finished my summer reading to the kids this afternoon with the end of Little House in the Big Woods, a book we read together three years ago (half my daughter’s lifetime) and that the kids wanted to revisit.
I’m so glad they did. I had forgotten how delightful this book is.
We finished re-learning about how Ma made cheese and how she prepared hominy (which she called hulled corn) and how Pa convinced all his neighbors in the Big Woods of Wisconsin to hire an eight-horse-powered (literally horse powered) threshing machine that could do three weeks of work in a single day. In the end they are ready for winter, with their ample food stores in attic and cellar, and Pa plays his fiddle, sending us out to the strains of Auld Lang Syne.
When the fiddle had stopped singing Laura called out softly, “What are days of auld lang syne, Pa?”
“They are the days of a long time ago, Laura,” Pa said. “Go to sleep, now.”
But Laura lay awake a little while, listening to Pa’s fiddle softly playing and to the lonely sound of the wind in the Big Woods. She looked at Pa sitting on the bench by the hearth, the fire-light gleaming on his brown hair and beard and glistening on the honey-brown fiddle. She looked at Ma, gently rocking and knitting.
She thought to herself, “This is now.”
She was glad that the cosy house, and Pa and Ma and the fire-light and the music, were now. They could not be forgotten, she thought, because now is now. It can never be a long time ago.
That’s the end.
I found myself having to stop and take breaks reading this last bit because I kept choking up. Maybe it was Auld Lang Syne that set me off. I have a pre-existing weakness for that song because it’s what George Bailey sings when he’s reunited with his family and friends after he realizes that his life is worth living.
More than that, though, it was the understanding that Laura wrote this book in her 60′s, looking back on a way of life that by then no longer existed. I’m reading this book about a time more than 130 years ago, and little Laura thinks, “this is now”, and I’m looking at my own “now” and seeing how different it already is than the “now” of our last reading this book together, and I know that in a blink I’ll be in my 60′s and today’s “now” will be a long time ago.
What can I say? I’m a sentimental fool.
But now that I sit and think it out, I realize that I was this sentimental last time I read the book. And as much as I loved being with my 3- and 5-year-olds, I wouldn’t trade today’s “now” to go back to then. I’m enjoying today too much.
I never know when a teaching moment will show up. Today it happened when I looked in the fridge at lunchtime and noticed that we were out of jelly.
“How about PB and banana?” I asked the kids. “That was Elvis’ favorite sandwich.”
“Who’s Elvis?” they wanted to know. Which was a better response than the expected, “Yuck!”
So while I slapped together the ingredients, I told them. “Elvis was a singer. He was one of the most successful singers who ever lived. He brought the blues to rock and roll.”
“What are the blues?”
This question caused me to bust out in my own blues riff about being out of jelly and having to make peanut butter and banana sandwiches. They weren’t impressed.
“You don’t sound very sad,” my boy told me.
So then I did my best imitation of Big Mama Thornton singing Hound Dog. It’s sort of mid-tempo, and she’s disgusted with the guy she’s singing about. They seemed to like that one better.
“Elvis changed it like this,” I said, and I did my rendition of him. I’m two lines in before my girl starts dancing. So then I pulled out my laptop and we listened to the real Elvis. They forgot all about sandwiches and started rocking out to The King in the kitchen.
“Y’all have no idea how radical this music was. When Elvis first came out, this was the kind of music people listened to…” On my computer I pulled up a bunch of doo-wop and mid ’50s rock. We listened to it in all its chorale earnestness and sleepy tempo.
“This is really boring,” my girl said.
“Now Elvis.” I put Hound Dog back on, and they were rocking out again. We danced to All Shook Up, Jailhouse Rock, and Don’t Be Cruel. They wandered off to the living room when I put on a ballad, so I took that opportunity to finish assembling lunch. Afterward, we watched this YouTube of Elvis’ breakthrough performance on Milton Berle:
“Elvis looks like a scientist,” my boy said.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“He’s wearing a white coat. He looks like he could do experiments when he’s not singing.”
I thought that was pretty funny.
As it turned out, the experimental sandwiches were kind of yucky. But we had fun.
The Big M has long had a dream of owning a Corvette. To help make this dream a reality, he sold his nice truck and used a portion of the proceeds to buy a less nice truck as his daily driver so as to free up funds for the dream car.
Our boy has been very involved in the process. Every time Dad takes out his wallet, an eight-year-old voice pipes up. “Dad, is that the Corvette money?” On the rare occasions that yes, it is some of the Corvette money being spent on a necessity, Dad must endure the wrath of a small boy.
It’s been a lot of fun watching the two of them search Craigslist together for dream cars and daily drivers. They discuss options and colors and condition quality ad nauseum, and I’m glad to let them do it.
Our kid is very opinionated, and very interested in making his opinion heard. When Dad decided to buy a particular daily driver that the boy didn’t like, he let his father have it. And when Dad cut off the audio assault, he moved to a written one. Here it is:
I don’t know if I find the assertion that “it smells weard” funnier or the line about “it had ants so it creaped me out.” Or maybe the fact that he split up the word “truck” so as to stay within the margins.
To bolster his argument, he got his sister in on it:
You’ll have to insert “The Boy” into the blank part. But he had her sold on the windows not rolling down part.
Alas for those two, their dad bought the truck anyway. It seems for now that he has rid it of ants, and he figured out how to replace the window motors so that they now roll down. We’re hoping it will be a reliable daily driver while he searches for his dream car.
Yesterday I saw about the cutest thing I’ve seen in a while: my 8-year-old boy dressed up in his brand-new Cub Scout uniform for his very first Cub Scout meeting. He was so proud in his new cap and blue shirt and shorts with the scarf and belt and matching socks. I had spent part of the afternoon applying all of the required insignia. And there was a lot.
He was a little apprehensive about starting scouts. I can appreciate that. It’s scary joining a new group, especially one that’s already established. But he got to his meeting, and one of his best friends from school was there to greet him, so it started great.
The meeting got better, apparently. The guest speaker was a local sheriff’s deputy, there to teach the kids about safety and to fingerprint them. First of all, police-types are right up my boy’s alley. Secondly, he loves to match wits with adults, and this man was asking questions.
“How do fingerprints work?” asked the deputy.
After some false starts and hemming and hawing from various scouts, my boy jumped in. “Your fingers have oil on them, and when you touch things, it leaves the oil behind in the shapes that are on your fingertips.”
“Right,” said the deputy, who then moved his presentation to the next Power Point slide which, according to The Big M, said almost verbatim what our boy had just said.
I knew sending him to Spy Camp this summer would pay off.
Later the deputy was showing the kids how to dial 9-1-1, and showed a picture of various kinds of phones. He pointed to a rotary dial phone. “I’ll bet none of you know what this is.”
Au contraire. “Actually,” replied my boy, “my dad and I are restoring an old phone like that.” And they are — it’s an old black rotary dial wall phone from my grandparents’ farm. It’s almost ready for install in my library. It’s pretty complicated to get it to work on a digital phone line, apparently.
Question after question, the deputy tried to stump my boy. He finally succeeded when he asked my kid to dial 9-1-1 on his cell phone. It was one of those sliding types, which my son hadn’t seen before. That got him.
I’m so looking forward to this season of scouting!
How is it that — thanks to children — I no longer have a gag reflex at the sight of someone else’s vomit, feces, or urine, but I about lose my mind when I see crayons on the carpet?
Entropy is the natural order of things, so why am I so irritated when they trash my house? I don’t feel disrespected. They’re just doing what comes naturally. But the clutter, the disorganization, the spills, the stains, the cups of curdled milk under the furniture, the toys strategically placed for maximum tripping effect, the dirty underwear on the couch, the stairs, and the dining table … it’s chipping away at my soul.
Sisyphus and his stone-rolling had nothing on a housewife picking up after young children.
I’m asking this as a serious question: why is order so important for my (and most other adult people’s) sanity? When I know that I will look back on this time in my life as a golden era, why am I struggling to appreciate in the now all of the aspects that I will remember fondly in the future? I know that someday there will come a morning when I wake up and the house I cleaned the night before will still be clean. So why can’t I feel chill about it all?
I’m going to have to think about it and get back to you.
We didn’t have a lot of time to hang out in Memphis during our whirlwind tour of nine states in nine days. We had a quick lunch, and then looked for a nearby park to let the kids blow off some steam before pressing on another 3 1/2 hours to Nashville.
I found a place called Memorial Park, which turned out to be a cemetery. Weirdly, it also turned out to have the Crystal Shrine Grotto.
Mexican artist Dionicio Rodriguez built the grotto in the 1930′s. It’s a man-made cave of concrete and embedded quartz crystals featuring scenes from the life of Christ. Scenes like this:
The artist seemed to be heavily influenced by Gaudí.
The giant tree trunk is called “Abraham’s Oak”, after the father of the three Abrahamic religions. It also is made of concrete. It’s Disney before there was Disneyland.
There was a nice little pond.
Even a nearby bench got in on the action:
I stepped back across the street to get a shot of the whole grotto area, and found this memorial. Can you dig it?
And here’s the view of the grotto from across the street:
There’s my girl delighting in one bridge…
And my boy contemplating another.
They romped and ran and expended energy. It wasn’t what I expected when I declared that we needed to find a park, but it worked out well. And if you were in a mood to be contemplative, which I was, it fit the bill.
P.S. I found my camera cord. More vacation photos to come.
My little daughter dumped all the money out of her purse onto the living room carpet this morning. It was mostly coins and one-dollar bills. She counted slowly and carefully. Her brother poked his hand in periodically, trying to sneak away a coin or two when she wasn’t looking. When she did look at him, he tried to invent a multi-dollar fine she could pay him for some imagined slight.
She finished and looked up at me. “I have $18.”
Then she smiled. “Today is Friday, so that means allowance day.”
“That’s true,” I said.
“I don’t really need all this money,” she said. “Dad didn’t know what our allowance was this one time, and he gave us a dollar, and I thought that was fine. You should give us a dollar for allowance instead of five dollars.”
As I mulled this over, her brother frantically shook his head.
And the amazing thing is, the girl knows the difference between one and five dollars, and she’s not kidding. She’d be happy to take less. Ever since she could talk, she’s been blowing my mind on a regular basis with little gestures that show her unselfish nature.
I cannot figure out where it comes from. How did this child spring from my loins?
Meanwhile, my boy walks around giving stock tips. Remember how he told everyone at the Iowa wedding on June 12th not to buy BP yet? It opened at $34.05 that day. Today it closed at $27.02.
Now he contends that Procter & Gamble is doomed to fail. I have no idea where he’s getting that from, but I’m mildly nervous. I like my Bounce and Bounty, my Dawn and Duracell, my Cascade and CoverGirl. I need Tide and Gillette and Crest and Secret.
O, belovéd consumer staples provider, I’d be lost without you. Why must my little child sound the herald of your demise?
But seriously, where is he getting that from?
I may be living with Warren Buffett. And his unselfish sister.
