The Hat, Part II

Success is sweet, especially after a few failures. After I returned the overpriced hat I had bought for Lucia, I was determined to make a sunhat out of my own fabric remnants. I measured and cut, but my first attempt came out looking like a parachute:



Today, not only did I measure, but I made a paper mock-up. I did math (fractions!). I pinned and ironed. This is what I came up with:



It actually fits me (somewhat), but Lucia's head and my head are compatible in size. I'm leaving the hat out on the coffee-table for Lucia to discover tomorrow morning. The girl won't wear anything unless she thinks it's her idea.

Have a good weekend, everyone. Next week, I'll tell you about the nap-time story I've made up for Lucia.

The Hat

From The Quangle Wangle's Hat, by Edward Lear

On the top of the Crumpetty Tree
The Quangle Wangle sat,
But his face you could not see,
On account of his Beaver Hat.
For his hat was a hundred and two feet wide,
With ribbons and bibbons on every side
And bells, and buttons, and loops, and lace,
So that nobody ever could see the face
Of the Quangle Wangle Quee.

I know the first verse of "The Quangle Wangle's Hat" by heart, as I heard it as a bouncing-rhyme when I was a little girl. The poem continues with the Quangle-Wangle admitting loneliness, followed by a host of other creatures building their nests on his hat. There have been a couple of picture book versions over the years, but I haven't been thrilled with any of them. Modern slang and shifts in meaning of language have made people skitter away from reading some of my favorite poems aloud. The most (in)famous of them all is another poem by Lear, "The Owl and the Pussycat". I don't resent the shifts in language, but it does make me cross that we haven't retained the original meanings of some of the words. I hate changing the language of what someone else wrote to accomodate political-correctness. I'd rather not read the story or poem aloud at all. One notable exception, however, is the reworking of Helen Bannerman's The Story of Little Black Sambo into The Story of Little Babaji, illustrated by Fred Marcellino. What's my rationale? The story is terrific!

I do make changes when I read aloud as a parent to Lucia. In the Jenny Linsky books, a cat's "Indian feathered headdress" becomes "feathered headdress." Characters who are "gay" become "merry," and if I notice gender stereotypes, I comment on them.

This post has gone in a different direction than I had planned. Really, I was going to talk about hats. Traditionally, Lucia has refused to wear a sun-hat. The hats she's gotten are beautiful, but Lucia has a thick head of hair, and I can understand why wearing a hat in the heat would be uncomfortable. Yesterday, we were in an alternative children's clothing store, and Lucia was having a fun time trying on costume skirts and shoes. I found a blue hat with a simple patch in the shape of a goose that I thought might appeal to Lucia, even though I wasn't overly thrilled with it. Lucia enjoyed it, and I thought, "Okay, I'll get this for her." I had looked at the prices of the other hats in the store, but conveniently overlooked the price on the approved hat. It was only when the cashier was ringing up the purchase that it hit me: the hat I was buying for Lucia was more expensive than a hat I would buy for myself. I was embarrassed to admit I had made that kind of mistake (not the first time, either), so I let the purchase ring through. I admit I was also scared of my toddler's potentially explosive reaction to taking back a hat that she had chosen.

I brooded about the purchase as we walked toward the cafe where Bede was going to pick us up. I tried to rationalize the purchase, but couldn't. I just couldn't. The hat wasn't even very pretty.

I did take it back, though. Ten minutes later, Bede, Lucia and I walked into the shop, and I told the cashier, "This hat was an impulse purchase." The cashier was quite kind about the whole matter. (What had I been so afraid of?) As far as Lucia's reaction went, it wasn't as bad as I thought. As I write this, I cannot believe that I was going to let my fears of her potential meltdown determine my parenting and financial responsibilities. The past couple of days had been difficult, but still, what was the big deal?

I know what the big deal was. I've wasted a lot of energy and worry over the thought that Lucia's refusal to wear a sun-hat means I am a negligent parent, exposing her to harmful ultraviolet light despite the sunblock I've slathered on her skin. Before I had a child, it was easy for me to look at other parents and think, "Why don't they put hats on their children's heads? Why are the children running around without coats on? Why don't they just be really firm with their kids and MAKE them stop screaming?"

It's humbling to be one of those "other parents." I often blow things out of proportion. It's helpful to hear my mother say, "Look, when you were a baby, I didn't put sunblock on you, and you didn't even tan." It's helpful to hear my father point out that Lucia will know to burrow under the blankets if she gets cold in bed, and that we don't have to run the heat higher than normal to protect her little toes from the chill. New parents need experienced parents to point out when things are blown out of proportion. As a teenager, I used to get bent out of shape when the adults in my life pointed out how silly I was. Now, I could use a little more of those kinds of reminders. Like the Quangle-Wangle, maybe I need more creatures to build their nests on my hat.

If they do, though, I'm going to need a bigger hat!

I sew things

You may wonder what I do with my free time when I'm not writing stories.

I lounge by the heated pool sipping mojitos after my strenuous polo matches

I clean the house from top to bottom, making sure that my lovely daughter can see her reflection in the fireplace tiles

I plan and make delicious gourmet meals that require me first to go into the backyard to milk the cow so that I can make my own cheese from scratch

I sew things. Each time I attempt a project, I make progress. Today's project, a pair of wide-legged pink trousers, came out quite satisfactorily. I plan to wear them three days in a row.

I'm quite fortunate. While Lucia has become jealous of my guitar practice to the point where she climbs up on my lap and hugs me while flattening the guitar with her tummy, she is often a good sport when it comes to sewing. As long as she can talk to me, unroll ribbons, play with the spools of thread (a particular favorite is "Robin the Bobbin" who rolls upon the pin-cushion as if it were a slide), place her toes on the cut-out fabric I've laid upon the floor, pull apart the sticky-notepad I keep in my sewing box, measure her arms with the dinosaur-shaped tape-measure, and make her dollies "walk the plank" on the hem gauge, she's content to let me work on my projects for certain stretches of time. She knows she's not supposed to touch the pins and needles, and has been fairly respectful of the sewing machine. Once, I was sewing a zig-zag hem on the collar of her umbrella-print tunic, and all of a sudden, the machine went really-really-really fast. I'm sure that if I had been sitting under the table, I wouldn't have been able to resist finding out what happened when I pushed down harder on the sewing machine pedal.

Tomorrow, I'm going to sew a jacket.

Update: It was bound to happen that I would mess up a project. I didn't do so well on the jacket I planned. In fact, the jacket is now scraps for future quilting projects (not mine). So it goes! I was a bit down about it earlier, but my mother reminded me that jackets are difficult.

Earth Day (April 22): a story

From Ragnarok to Armageddon, I am fascinated by stories of the end of the world. I am terrified by the idea of everything I know and love ending once and for all, and yet in so many of these stories, there are elements of rebirth and hope.

I am a fan of good science-fiction. I am not a fan of literalistic interpretations of Biblical text. Maybe I could stomach those kinds of novels if the writing were any good. Usually, it’s not. A friend of mine is writing a novel of the Apocalypse that shows a lot of promise, but I believe her manuscript is in the minority of good eschatological fiction. When stories of the end-times come across as full of dogmatic propaganda without any sense of character growth and interesting plot development, I’d just as soon read a teen romance series novel where the identical twins discover the high school class president they fancy is actually an alien from Alpha Orionis (i.e. Betelgeuse) who can take only one person to the Galactic Prom. Who will it be: the vivacious, outgoing twin who is skilled at mastering languages or the contemplative twin who has a knack for quantum physics?

I digress.

I’ve had the first line of a story kicking around in my brain for awhile: When the apocalypse arrived, it was nothing like we expected. That’s all I had. When I received a traveling notebook in the mail from ABCGirl, I decided to take the story further. No matter how silly, how outlandish, I would move beyond that first line. So, here goes. (ABCGirl, if you want to be surprised when you receive your notebook, you might want to avert your eyes now.)

Earth Day

When the apocalypse arrived, it was nothing like we expected. The lack of levitating bodies made some people quite angry. “We were supposed to be saved!” they howled. “Where are the Trump and the Call? Where are the rivers of blood? We’ve been had!”

Most of us, however, were relieved that the end of the world as we knew it would commence in a calm, relatively non-dramatic way. The angel in charge of our clean-up unit explained it this way: “There was a choice we had to make. Plan A involved waging terrible wars in which seas boiled and countries burned. Plan B involved a thousand years of peace. Everyone On High talked it over and we all finally agreed on Plan B. The Great Almighty actually likes Earth, you know. It’s such a pretty combination of blue, brown and green. However…” and the angel lifted three of its eyebrows in warning, “That doesn’t mean you’re off the hook. Things have gotten quite messy around here.”

We all got scared. Was the Judgment going to happen, then? Were some of us going to heaven and most of us going to hell, as the televangelists and pulp novelists had predicted?

“No, no,” the angel said. “That would be silly and wasteful. This matter is a big deal. Remember when you were little and your parents said you couldn’t go out to the movies and have ice-cream with your friends until you had cleaned up your rooms?”

Of course we did.

“That’s the basic idea,” the angel said. “Only, you’re going to clean up the planet. Don’t worry! You’re getting lots of help from On High.” The angel started handing out garbage-bags and recycling buckets.

“We’re all going to do our bit to clean up Earth,” the angel said. “We’ll start out by picking up trash from the streets and work our way up to reversing global warming. Before you know it, this planet will be glistening and fresh. You’ll be so proud of yourselves, too.”

“This is going to take forever!” someone wailed.

The angel smiled. “No, no, not forever. It just seems that way now. Just think: when we’re all done, we all get to go to heaven.”

“What’s so great about heaven?” someone grumbled as he started picking up aluminum cans and cigarette butts off the ground.

“Our film collection is quite good,” the angel said. “Also, the ice-cream is better than anything you have ever tasted.”

Tulip Festival and Kite-Flying

Last Tuesday, Bede, Lucia and I went to the Annual Tulip Festival of Skagit County, Washington. We always go prepared for rain. Even when there's sunshine (as there was last Tuesday), we can almost always count on lots of mud. There's something wonderful for me about attending the Tulip Festival every year. It's not just looking at all the tulips and daffodils, lovely though they are. It's the one time of the year in which I go out of my way to appreciate my adopted home state of Washington. Many of my friends go hiking and skiing in the mountains on a regular basis. They are "connected to nature." Usually, I'm not likely to go hiking anywhere more adventuresome than the Arboretum. Mount Rainier has some good walking trails, but it's two hours away, and while we're sure Lucia would be cheerful for the drive out to Paradise, we're not so sure our girl would keep from having a meltdown on the return trip. The Tulip Festival, however, is only an hour's drive from where we live. With all of its open fields and muddy puddles, the festival is heaven for a child in rainboots. We don't spend that much time looking at the tulips up-close, but appreciate the swaths of color over the landscape:


Flower rainbow of Tulip Town


Alkelda and Lucia within the flower rainbow

I admit that one of the main reasons I like to go to the Tulip Festival is so that I can fly my little kite. The average kite needs 8-12 mph winds to stay up in the air. I have one of those kites, but I like my little 5 mph kite. I'm a beginning kite-flyer, and I need a bit of success at the onset for encouragement. While we have a Kite Hill at one of our parks, if the wind is good, the hill is filled with other kite-flyers. If I take my kite out to an open, empty field, there's a good bet that five minutes later, someone is going to start a baseball game. Normally, I'm a city girl to the bone, but when it comes to flying kites, I long for wide open spaces. I find those spaces at the Tulip Festival plus the bonus of children saying, "Look! A kite!"



Alkelda flies the kite (superimposed to show that in theory, there is something at the end of the string)

Lest you think that this storytelling blog is turning into a scrapbooking blog of my travels in the Pacific Northwest, here is a song about kites, and here is a story in which kites are important.

Red Eggs

Yesterday, the Magdalene Review featured legends of the red egg in conjunction with Easter and Mary Magdalene. There's a funny variation involving a chicken, too.

I meant to make red eggs this year for an Easter party, that is, hard-boiled eggs soaked in sweet-beet juice. However, I was distracted with other things, and but did get it together to make Knox blox with black raspberry juice.

An earlier post about red eggs:
Legend of the Red Egg.

Bede's Update on his Mom

Bede just sent out this note to the people who get our family newletter:

I spoke with my family back East again today and got some more news on my Mom. She's not very comfortable and her health is not well, but they don't believe she is in immediate danger. They were able to make some changes to her medication that helped, and her gall stones seem to have calmed down a bit. Thank you, everyone, for the prayers and offerings of sympathy. We greatly appreciate them. I'll keep you all informed if anything changes.

Booktalk Friday: Invisible Enemies

Invisible Enemies: Stories of Infectious Disease, by Jeanette Farrell

For some reason, it’s hard for me to convince anyone that a book about infectious diseases is a fascinating, fast-paced adventure filled with illuminating facts, chilling rumors and remarkable discoveries as engrossing as any high-profile thriller. Perhaps the lack of enthusiasm stems from my overuse of “ing” words? Or does the skepticism lie deeper in the bowels of fear and misunderstanding? For example, leprosy, once considered a highly communicable scourge that represented sinfulness and subjected its victims to isolation and exile, is actually a treatable, non-fatal bacterial infection that we now refer to as Hansen’s Disease. Six other infectious diseases (smallpox, plague, tuberculosis, malaria, cholera, and AIDS) all get their own chapters. Each one has a compelling story. Some of the stories have happy endings, while others are still mysteries in progress.

Have I convinced you yet? I suspect that I haven’t. I’ll tell you what: just pick up the book and read the introduction. Normally, I’m not much of a mystery/thriller reader, but if more fiction books of that genre were written like Invisible Enemies, I think I’d be a fan.

A companion book called Invisible Allies: Microbes That Shape Our Lives, was published last year. I’m going to read it, and not just because a friend of mine reviewed the book for School Library Journal. If there are indeed beneficial microbes in chocolate, then I want to know all about them!

Yip-Yip Hurray For a Television Break

A diversion:

Yesterday, Brad the Gorilla was griping about how some Sesame Street characters never got their due. He is particularly disgusted with a character who shall not be mentioned (this character's lawyers are meaner than weasels in a coal mine), but to whom Brad refers as "an overrated clump of bright red fur."

"Where are the Yip-Yip Martians when we need them?" he complained. "Once again, the bright and flashy players get all of the attention, while the deceptively simple brilliance of the supporting actors is all but forgotten."

I was awake around 4 am this morning (yucky dreams) when I discovered these two skits starring the Yip-Yip Martians:

Yip Yip Martians Meet the Telephone

Yip Yip Martians Meet the Computer

There you go, Brad. Have a little patience while the video clips load. If anyone finds other clips of the Yip-Yip Martians, please send them to Brad at his email address: brad [PERIOD] the [PERIOD] gorilla [SHIFT KEY + 2 KEY] gmail [PERIOD] com.

Not such good news

Bede's mother has taken a turn for the worse.

I Know Where I'm Going

I'm learning this song on the guitar:

I know where I'm going
I know who's going with me
I know who I love
And my dear knows who I'll marry.

I have stockings of silk
And shoes of bright green leather
Combs to buckle my hair
And a ring for every finger.

Feather beds are soft
And painted rooms are bonnie
But I would give them all
For my handsome winsome Johnny.

Some say he is bad
But I say he's bonnie
Fairest of them all
Is my handsome winsome Johnny.

I know where I'm going
I know who's going with me
I know who I love
And my dear knows who I'll marry.

You may listen to the tune here.

Good things

Thank you, all, for your good wishes about Bede's mother and continued encouragement to write stories. I haven't responded yet to all of your comments, but I will-- if not today, than this weekend. Even though my comments on your blogs are a bit sparse this week, I do check your blogs on a daily basis.


Brad the Gorilla has been rather quiet this week, I've noticed. He claims that he has sore pads on all of his fingers and toes from working diligently on his memoirs, but lately I've caught him playing Laser Squad Nemesis and Ultracorps quite a bit on Bede's computer.

Today's Booktalk Friday is more along the lines of my hopping up and down, saying "Read it- Read it- Read it!" than something I'd do for a formal booktalk. So much of what I do in terms of reader's advisory is informal booktalking.

Good things this week:

1)Bede's mother is finally at home on bed-rest.

2)Lucia has just been accepted to the Waldorf preschool we hoped she'd attend starting in September.

3)While we're sad that our Family Resources Coordinator is leaving Boyer Children's Clinic one month before Lucia's last day, the FRC is going to be principal of a school that will need a part-time children's librarian. Potentially, I will be able to do some work for the school in the capacity that I can bring Lucia with me on days she doesn't have preschool.

4)The House of Glee (sans Ulric) will travel to New Jersey and New York this June to visit relatives. On the way back, we will travel cross-country by train. (Note to potential house-robbers: there will be people checking up on our house and cats on a continual basis, and if you find yourself on Ulric's bad side, I pity you.) We'll be staying in New York City three days and Yonkers the rest of the time. Will you be around NYC then? If so, email me and we can meet for coffee and real pierogies.

Booktalk Friday: Jenny and the Cat Club

Jenny and the Cat Club: A Collection of Favorite Stories about Jenny Linsky, by Esther Averill

Jenny Linsky is a little black cat adopted by a sea-master named Captain Tinker in the New York City neighborhood of Greenwich Village. Jenny is a shy cat, which is why the sea-captain knitted a red scarf for her. What Jenny longs for more than anything is to join the Cat Club. However, to join the Cat Club, you have to be able to do something. For example, the fluffy Persian cat, Madame Butterfly, can play the nose-flute. Sinbad and the Duke are rough, tough fighters of the city streets. Romulus and Remus, the twin spotted cats, are adept at catching fish from the local fish-market. Solomon the cat is a studious reader. But what can Jenny do? In despair, she hides from the cats with whom she most desires to be friends, and it is not until winter, when Captain Tinker floods the garden to make a pond for children to skate upon, that Jenny finally musters the courage to discover her special talent.

In these five stories about Jenny Linsky and her friends, the shy cat finds that bravery comes in different forms. Sometimes, she have to run through the streets filled with aggressive dogs in order to deliver important messages, while other times, courage involves unselfishness to others. In all instances, Jenny comes through in funny and surprising ways.

Two of my other favorite books about Jenny Linsky are Jenny's Moonlight Adventure
The School for Cats
These books about Jenny Linsky and her friends have long been out of print,* but thanks to the New York Review Children’s Collection, they have been republished in attractive, sturdy hardbound volumes. They are a bit pricey, and unlikely to come out in paperback, but I am slowly gathering the books I love, bit by bit.

*The one exception has been the I Can Read chapter-book about Pickles, The Fire Cat. While Jenny and friends aren't mentioned by name in the book, you will see pictures of them riding in Pickles' fire-truck.

P.S. Jenny's Bedside Book is out of print and very expensive on the online booksite listings. If you see it somewhere for a ridiculously low price, please let me know.

Planet Shaping

[My journal of alien contact]

I’ve already said I’m not supposed to talk about the Mars terraforming project. Zeke, however, was able to talk all he liked about the terraforming* project of Sarter’s neighboring planet, Avas. While Avas was still primarily a host for research, much as Antarctica had been for Earth centuries back, there were growing communities of homesteaders who settled around the equatorial lands of Avas. The planet hosted the usual wintering-over of tourists who inevitably returned to Sarter with inflated stories of derring-do and rumors of haunted ice-caves.

Round-trips were expensive, and there weren’t too many people on Sarter to disprove the tall-tales of the thrill-seeking planet-hoppers. However, Zeke had spent a year on Avas working in the mines, and said that the main entertainment besides racing snow-plows was mountain-sliding. However, mountain-sliding on Avas was incredibly dangerous. Sarter made mountain-sliding illegal after investors complained about the high mortality rates.

"Planet-hoppers inevitably stretch the truth about their mountain-sliding experiences," Zeke said last week. The conversation seemed to start from nowhere, as the TIC was slow that day. We were experiencing a lag-time in messages. So much for "instantaneous" communication.

"If they were completely honest," Zeke continued, "they wouldn’t have survived to tell their stories. Really, the most exciting part of the whole Avas internship was standing on the ground of a new planet and looking into the sky at a different configuration of stars. The work itself was rather monotonous. There were times when I would have welcomed a haunting from one of those alleged ice-cave monsters just to make my life a little more interesting. The most exciting part of the whole experience was the travel between planets. If I had my way, I would be traveling with the Sarter delegation to Alpha-Centauri A.”

So far, Sartereans were better suited to space-travel than Earthlings. Our celestronauts endured loss in bone-density, muscle-deterioration, and were highly susceptible to nose-bleeds. They spent many portions of their prolonged lives in hibernation. There was a narrow window of time in which a person could choose to train as a celestronaut. Space-travel was devastating to humans who hadn’t completed adolescence, yet training required many years before humans would even enter a space-ship for their initial launch. ISAP required early commitment with severe penalties for defecting from the program.

Nevertheless, many Earthlings wanted to be celestronauts. Celestronauts were our heroes, sacrificing all other goals for the glory of interstellar-exploration. The Alpha Centauri-A delegations knew that their chances of returning to their home planets were minute, but ISAP was confident we would discover faster-than-light travel in time for the delegations to return. Still, my grandmother urged me to avoid celestronaut training. “You cannot make that kind of decision about the rest of your life before you’ve even begun to live it,” she said. She was bitter. Grandmother had three daughters. Two of them married and had children. The youngest, my Aunt Io, was one of the celestronauts on her way to Alpha Centauri-A. I didn't know what made Grandmother angrier: the thought of never again seeing her youngest child or the knowledge that when ISAP started its celestronaut program, Grandmother was no longer a candidate for space-travel.

Glossary

ISAP: International Space Administration Program, pronounced "Ee-sop."
Sartereans: The intelligent species from the planet Sarter in contact with Earthlings, pronounced "Sar-ter-ray-ans."
TIC: Transgalactic Instantaneous Communicator, pronounced "tick."

Bede's Mom: Update

Bede's Mom had a procedure done yesterday to drain the gall bladder. She still has gall-stones, but is going home to be on bedrest for two months. No one knows yet whether or not she will need to have surgery, but if the gall stones work their way through, that will be a blessing.

Thanks for all of your prayers and good wishes.