Reading: The Carnivorous Carnival

Moving:

House and Garden: I keep the birdfeeders full.

Watching: "Hollywood Ending"

2 November 2002: Books

Last night NPR had a story about a Delaware town's pumpkin-tossing contest that they hold every All Saints' Day. The announcer eventually asked the organizer he was interviewing why they do this. The man replied, "It's like that proverbial mountain. It's because they're there." Last I checked, Everest was real.

This morning I looked through a newsletter our insurance company sent, aiming for an article about SUVs so I could feel smug. First I saw a list of statistics about teenaged drivers. "One third of all teenage deaths are due to car accidents." Well, of course. They're not dying of old age, are they? Actually that's a smaller fraction than I would have guessed. There are other forms of accidents and suicide and drugs, but still that's a lot of deaths by disease.

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I had some presents to fetch at the Tattered Cover. The one for Haitch is obvious enough and she probably knows but I won't name it anyway. Another is for Eliza, if it counts as a present if I read Carnivorous Carnival before I send it. The rest were for Christmas and birthday presents for Emlet and Nisou. Nisou, if you're reading, skip down.

I plucked books off the shelves recklessly, some just because they were pretty. One of the pretty ones turned out to be charming and pretty and a keeper, A Lot of Otters. It's a bedtime book. Aha! The same author wrote and illustrated Grandfather Twilight. No wonder it's so lovely. I picked it up because, hey, otters! but also because the cover, where it does not have otters, has blue sky and green sea and what could be prettier? Mother Moon is searching for her child, her Moonlet, which is a good Emlet book.

In Ogunquit I looked into a toyshop as I passed its windows and was sucked in, thwook. I didn't know any Seuss characters had been licensed for toys! So I bought Horton for Emlet, and last night I finally bought Horton Hears a Who! and Horton Hatches the Egg, the latter of which happens to be a great story for a child of Emlet's persuasion. And for me too, because an elephant is faithful, one hundred percent.

Another book I hadn't thought of but that presented itself to me (because I should have thought of it) was The Story about Ping. My mother gave that to me for one early Easter or birthday and it is the oldest book I own. Also it's set in China, and Mandarin is Nisou's latest project.

And then the miracle happened. I picked up Crow Boy by Taro Yashima, which I'd never heard of or at least didn't remember, and what I saw behind it made me gasp, drop to my knees, touch it reverently. For a while I have been trying to remember a picture book that I loved as a little girl. It was about another little girl who received an umbrella and galoshes for her birthday and couldn't wait to wear them but the sun kept shining and shining for days. There were ideograms that I knew were "Oriental" (it was the '70s and I hadn't been PC'd yet) meaning rain, umbrella, etc. in addition to the English story. The illustrations were in watercolor, as befits a story about rain, and when it finally does rain, there are Seussian syllables about the sound of the rain. I kept meaning to submit a query to Loganberry Books.

Umbrella, by Taro Yashima. So the little girl was Japanese (my younger self couldn't distinguish between Japan and China and I probably thought of Japan as China's little friend country anyway, the way I thought Portugal was Spain's little friend and Belgium France's and Ireland England's and Austria Germany's. I was overextending my Yogi Bear and Booboo metaphor, and I remember being distinctly pained when I learned that Portuguese has less in common with Spanish than Italian has. Bad little sidekick!)

Umbrella is as lovely as I remember. The raindrops' music says bon polo, bon polo, ponpolo ponpolo. The little girl's name is Momo, meaning peach. What a wonderful story. I sound like Captain Kangaroo.

What else. Dr. Seuss and Mother Goose are vital groundings in English, and I found an edition of Mother Goose with proper illustrations (Jessie Wilcox Smith, though Blanche Fisher Wright is also acceptable). Proper illustrations are a problem. I have to make sure Emlet has an Ernest Shepard Wind in the Willows, not a Michael Hague, who should keep his mitts off Narnia too, since Pauline Baynes is all anyone should need. The only allowable re-illustrations are Garth Williams' for the Little House books. Those first editions were illustrated by--I love the web--Helen Sewell, with some co-illustrated by Mildred Boyle. Hey! Helen Sewell illustrated Baby Island. Why did I recently read that? Did I feel guilty for not liking Caddie Woodlawn as much as I might have?

The other thing I got a lot of pleasure out of doing--more, maybe, than anyone in LeMans will get from the owning of them--was painting some bits I found for Emlet. A little shelf with three pegs under it and a letter E for her wall.

Mostly it was a kick just to play with my poster paints and mix up colors. I had planned on swirls but couldn't sustain the pattern in the paint or transfer it to the pieces, so I did solids, except that I polka-dotted the underside of the shelf.

I made a pair of Moomins--Moomintroll and Moominmaiden--for Nisou I think as a going-away present when she moved to Brattleboro. I didn't know this at the time but the polymer clay for Moomintroll was glow-in-the-dark, so he was a surprise, and for some reason I decided to make Moominmaiden swirly. I must have had the moominmolding down, because she stayed consistently swirly instead of becoming singly-colored with overwork. And I forget now but I think there was some textual support for her being swirly at some point. Melissa would know.

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We're debating going to New York City for the week of Thanksgiving. Near Thanksgiving: the actual day would be with family and then another day would be with the other set of family. Flying into the city and taking the train to New Haven would mean being Trapped in Family Houses, a fate to be avoided if at all possible. But RDC's grandfather's rusty truck is still around somewhere. "Would you drive around in that thing?" RDC asked.
"Sure," I replied. "I wouldn't mind going to San Francisco in the Doggie Diner truck either."
He didn't get it.