Reading: Little Men

Moving: Walked 3.6 miles

22 April 2000: Scenes from Egg Dyeing

Saturday, 2:15 p.m.

To the knock on the front door, I called, "Come in!" and no one did. No one has ever congratulated me on a modulated speaking volume, but I guess the knocker didn't hear me because he knocked again and I called again before going to the door and opening it. But it wasn't HAO or HPS or Hao's friend Ben or anyone else I expected.

"You don't know me," the man started, which was an excellent point to begin from. "That's why I didn't open the door myself when you called."
Meanwhile I'm standing there in the wide-open doorway on a breezy wet day with the bird on my shoulder. I retreated a few feet to shut Blake safe in his cage while I told him that yes, I had been expecting someone. He was very nice and I didn't cut him off with the usual patter about this being a non-soliciting neighborhood. He wanted to know where I went for oil changes.
Immediately I responded, "I have no idea [this is true]. You'd have to ask my husband [how sexist] but he's not home right now [a blatant lie]." I was hoping RDC would have assumed the visitor was Hao & Co. and stay in the study for a minute. He did.

But there I was, inviting a total stranger into the house because I thought it was someone else. Again. It makes for a friendly house anyway.

I hard-boiled 18 eggs. I had had to consult The Joy of Cooking, of course. I boil eggs exactly once a year, eggs being a well-known poison unless occurring in baked goods, and I never remember how. I was going to bring the water to a boil and then drop the refrigerated eggs in. Egg bombs. None cracked. I had bought a Paas set only because those dipper thingies are such a good idea, better than spoons. Otherwise I am against Paas tablets. Vinegar and food coloring is the only way to go. I was all ready.

The next time there came a knock on the door, I went to it all by myself. There in front of me stood another man who also wasn't Ben. Tall, shaggy-haired, booted, with interesting facial hair (not really so vitally interested; just a phrase I picked up from David Eggers. It took me only a split second to recognize Scott, but I wonder if I would have if I hadn't been in a Hao frame of mind. Whether I recognize someone or not is largely a matter of context.

The results:

Hao ate one egg before she even colored it. A waste of a shell. She also made an Eskimo Joe egg for Ben, their webmaster and a Ruffnecks egg for Scott--I think that was the nickname of his college frat. So I made a Dot Org egg for myself and a Dot Com one for RDC. HPS made a bunny egg. Both Aitches used decals from the Paas set (shudder). Ben made a tie-dye egg, and Hao made another egg for Scott in a self-portrait. Ben didn't recognize it as him until Hao added a joint. Also Hao figured out, if not the violet she'd been aiming for, a mauve dye that I quickly dumped my next egg into before the water cooled. I made a cockatiel egg, using the clear wax Paas crayon for the racing stripe and coloring the rest with colored pencils (much easier to manipulate than crayons), but then I got stupid and dyed it yellow. The egg looks like a headless cockatiel with a beady brown eye and an orange patch floating above the severed neck.

I don't remember how this came up, but Hao thought to tell Scott, Ben, and me about a story she wrote when she was six. She wanted to cripple her characters, I guess, and the only thing she (being six) could think of was that the characters' limbs would be permanently broken. We were overcome by giggles--we two--and she ended up gasping the last crucial plot points while I lay supine on the floor chortling. Ben and Scott regarded us evenly. Scott observed to Ben, "It's like watching a Spanish sitcom. You know it's supposed to be funny but you have no idea why."

Theirs is the poorer existence.

So I brought out my clothbound second-grade books, lovingly stitched together by my beloved Mrs. Plimpton. I've always preferred the penguin one because, in typing the monkey one, Mrs. Plimpton changed a few critical details--which details escapes me, but not the fact of the change. I don't know how I've overlooked showing these masterworks to Hao before, but now was the time. Watching her read them, breathlessly reading bits aloud and helpless with laughter, rejuvenated the pleasure I have always taken in them. Particularly in the penguin one, because hey, I was seven, and on every page, my careful, tilting, vast printed letters spell out "p e n q u i n."

Speaking of "theirs is the poorer existence," this all reminds me of SEBB. Nisou and I recently bemoaned our respective incompetence (she hers and I mine, since both of us consider the other just perfect and wonderful, which is what makes the friendship so satisfying). Nisou quoted me SEBB's usual response to such complaints, "Oh and you are the only one."

Junior year, SEBB wrote a story about all of us, copiously illustrated with mutilated photographs and rebus'd with headlines from British papers. When I recently wrote in Beth's forum about men on the bus who occupy more than one seat because they must spread their legs to "accommodate their tremendous members," I was paraphrasing--without quotation marks or cite, natch--that story. Something over two years ago, Hao had the misfortune to be in my house when, possessed of one of my rare cleaning fits, I unearthed my photocopy of that story and insisted she read it.

So I don't know how Hao had, up to today, escaped "Monks the Monkey" and "The Penquin's Job."

The other masterwork I had just finished that afternoon was Little Men.

This is what I wrote in my Spring Reads page:

I understand why everyone loves Little Women. Although the four sisters are cookie-cutter out of an impossibly idyllic family (yes, even by C19 standards), they're all likable and real enough. The twelve boys of Little Men serve no purpose besides pedantry.
The death of John Brooke wasn't like Mark Antony's. He didn't say, "I am dying, Egypt, dying..." His death was a lot like Beth's, which always makes me cry.

Actually it's just before, when Beth finds Jo's poem, that I collapse:
"Have I been all that to you, Jo?" she asked, with wistful, humble earnestness.
"O Beth, so much, so much!" and Jo's head went down upon the pillow, beside her sister's.

"As Beth had hoped, the 'tide went out easily' [source?]; and in the dark hour before the dawn, on the bosom where she had drawn her first breath, she quietly drew her last, with no farewell but one loving look, one little sigh." (Everyman, p. 373)
cf
"...and Daisy and Demi were in his arms as he fell asleep on Aunt Meg's breast." (Little, Brown, p. 282)

Maybe it's just palindromic page numbers and breasts they have in common. Can anyone explain to me why anyone who is in his 30s and--as far as the reader has been told--has never been sick, can die both in only a few hours and "peacefully" and "cheerfully"? And how a reader who comes to Little Men without having read Little Women first could know who John is, have developed any affection for him, or understand why he meant anything to the boys, when he hasn't so much as seen his own two older children in the whole course of the novel?

One other particular obvious weakness: on the top of page 232:
"'All right!' answered Dan, who was a boy of few words, and off they went."
For the next seven pages, who dominates the dialogue? Dan, expounding on natural and his own history.

Overall, the tone was the most off-putting. For what age did LMA intend Little Men? Did she intend it to be taught in EDCI [Education--Curriculum and Instruction]? If she's so fond of the little plays and frivolities that children the age of the boys and her audience indulge, why does she gently mock them, intrude continually on her story to take the reader under her wing and point fun?

I hereby excuse myself from Jo's Boys.

I have two comments even less related to the book than the above:

By peculiar coincidence, a friend of mine has been concurrently reading Little Men. Last week, before going outside to eat her lunch in the sun, she dropped Little Men on a table outside the lav so she wouldn't have to find a dry spot on the counter to set it while she peed. Two coworkers came into the lav behind her, and she recognized Mrs. X's voice as Mrs. X asked the other, "Are you reading Little Men?" The other woman had seen my friend go in ahead of them and said, "No, it must be Friend." When my friend emerged to wash her hands, Mrs. X gushed about how Little Men had been such a favorite of hers.
"Figures," my friend snickered in her mind as she uttered noncommittal sounds about it.

By today, when all I wanted to do was get it over with, I cast about for anything to amuse me. I read the following passage to Hao: "Dan...had taken care of the lawn so well, that Mrs. Jo always had smooth paths and nicely shaven turf by her door." (p. 273)

Is it just me?