Conversation with a 4 year old.

 I picked Ben up from playschool today and we had the following conversation.
"How was school today?"
"I don't like that yogurt."
"What yogurt?"
"That yogurt mommy packed in my bag. She (his teacher) put a note on it, said I don't like it." Sure enough I get home and the gogurt yogurt is still in the bag with a note from his teacher saying he wouldn't eat it.
"Did you play on the playground today?" I asked, knowing it had been raining all day.
"We went to the gym."
"Why didn't you play on the playground?"
"Because it was raining."
"What did you play?"
"I rode a motorcycle and played baketball (sic)."
"You rode a motorcycle!?" I asked with mock-surprise. Sounding a bit exasperated he replied, " A toy one."
Then he really did take me by surprise when he asked, "You know that game where Shaggy is dead?"
"Ah, no."  
"We played that, when Shaggy was dead." O-kay.
"Who were you?"
"Shaggy."
"You were dead?"
"No, Scooby was dead this time." Oh, of course.
"Maybe you should play nicer games." It was worth a shot.
"Nah, we don't wont to."      
"Whose idea was it to play this game?" Please don't let it have been yours, I thought, I really don't need to get notes home from the teacher for this.      
"I was just thinking about it today." Do 4 year olds really sit around and contemplate life and death?
"So it was your idea to play?" Please say no.
"No," yea, "it was Matties."
"Maddie, your sister?"
"No Mattie from school." Whew. So about now I'm thinking I need to change the subject or delve into the hows and whys of this game. I'm not real concerned because I've never know kids that age to be very organized players, Shaggy's dead is probably just a name for tag or something.  Thankfully his young mind thought of something much more important to discuss and as we pulled out on the highway he asked, "Can I have a snack?" Which was followed by another deep discussion on why we didn't have time to stop for a snack because after all it was, "just a snack."

My most favorite day of the year.

   There's a time and a place for everything under heaven, King Solomon wrote it and the Byrds sang it. For the purpose of my blog I say there's a time to be funny, which I often try and do, a time for introspection, a time to create and a time to reflect and with Thanksgiving, my most favorite holiday of them all (only minutes away as I write this) I think now would be as good a time as  any to reflect. I'm going to get a little sentimental and forgive me if I border on maudlin but it's the way I feel when I think of all the wonderful things in my life, there are so many things for me to be thankful for that a comprehensive list would go for days, so I'll just share those closest to my heart.
   I'm so thankful for a mother and father who raised me and loved me, I see and know so many people who didn't and don't have this basic need, two parents who worked to provide all my needs and most of my wants and that worked at their relationship, which was far from perfect, to provide a stable home for me and my sister. I'm thankful for a good job that pays decent and that I don't mind going too. A job that allows me to provide a roof over our heads, that allows us to have a full refrigerator and allows for plenty of life's comforts as well. I'm thankful for my children, as aggravating as they can sometimes be, they cause lots of worry and headache but make up for it with the joy they bring to my life. I'm thankful that they're all still healthy and I hope and pray they stay that way. I'm thankful for friends and family that smile when they see me and seem genuinely happy to see and here from me and, as silly as it is, I'm thankful for those friends and family that take the time to read this little blog. I know sometime tomorrow the question, what are you most thankful for, is going to come up and normally I'm wishy-washy on these kind of things but on this one I don't hesitate. I'm most thankful for my wonderful wife. Rainey has loved me and stood by me through some really difficult times, even through some times when she wished she didn't love me she still stayed right there, strong, the rock that not only our marriage but my whole life leaned upon. She's my cornerstone, holding the edifice of our life plum and square. She's also my best friend, the one I share my feelings, desires and fears with. The one I laugh with most often. She's beautiful and intelligent and I know I'd be lost without her. I'm also thankful that I can see that clearly now, there have been times when I've lost sight of how much we need each other, I hope I never do again. I love you Rainey, happy Thanksgiving. To all my friends, I love you guys, your the best, happy Thanksgiving.
   Now that I've got a little lump in my throat and a tear in the corner of my eye maybe it's time for a little levity. Thanksgiving marks the official start of the Christmas season and the earliest date I'll let myself listen to Christmas songs, so here's one to get ya' started: I want a Hippopotamus for Christmas.

It's Elmo's world, we're just living in it.

 This morning I took my two youngest to the park in Belmont, a very nice park, to play for awhile. Being a beautiful fall day with a little nip to the breeze we had on our pull-overs, mine and Sam's did not attract notice but Bens made him the star of the play ground. You may have guessed, given the title of the blog, that Ben was wearing an Elmo pull-over and you'd have guessed right. Ben's four and a big four at that and he was wearing this red hoodie with a large picture of every childs favorite Sesame Street resident on it, I don't know how we survived growing up before Elmo (Grover was always my favorite), and to a smaller child, well one smaller child in particular, he must have seen life sized. There were a few other children on the playground, all on the young side (young side of four mind you) and all a good deal smaller than Ben. One little boy, couldn't have been much more than a year old, took one look at Ben and his eyes grew large, he pointed at Ben and said 'Elmo'. He stared, star-struck, looked to his mom and said, "Momma, that Elmo." "Yes," replied the young fanatic's mother,"he's got Elmo on his shirt." Ben quickly pointed out to the woman that "That's my jacket, I've got wrestlers on my shirt." He proceeded to pull up his jacket to show her and she gave him a 'work with me kid' look and a nice little smile and nod. The young Elmo fan however was not to be dissuaded, he followed Ben around the playground much of the time we were there and occasionally would come up to him, wave at his 'jacket' and say, "Hey, Elmo." Eventually it came time for us to depart, I picked up Sam and told Ben to come on and we started away from the play equipment, Elmo's number one fan followed right along. His mother grabbed him by the arm right as he was leaving the play area, we told him bye and waved and he stood there on the edge of fandom and waved the way little kids do, with just their fingers moving, and said "Bye, Elmo." I'm sure if his mother would have let him he would have followed us all the way to, oh darn, I forget how you get there. Can you tell me? Can you tell me how to get, how to get to Sesame Street? How to get to Sesame Street?

Gaimania

I'm about a third of the way through my fourth Neil Gaiman book and I've just become more and more of a fan. This particular book is a collection of short stories, poems and oddities and like most short story collections some are better than others and some are maddeningly incomplete. There are some wonderfully imaginative  stories in here and I think that's what's so great about Gaiman is that his stories hold such a spark of magic, some are humorous, some dark, many are quite strange. One of my favorites so far is a poem (or is it just a short, short story?) titled Locks. Locks is about him telling his two year old the story of Goldilocks and how in doing so he's carrying on a tradition that goes back generations and about how his own reaction has changed to the story as he's grow older. It's really wonderful.
  I'm glad I'm still enjoying Gaiman as I picked up three of his books at GotBooks the other day, just because you like, or even love, a book by a writer doesn't mean you'll like everything by them. Those of you who read this probably know that I've listed Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse as my favorite book many a time and so I started trying to read more by Hesse, three other novels in and I don't know that I'll ever bring myself to try and finish his writings. Some were strange and one (The Glass Bead Game) committed the most horrible sin of being extremely boring. I read Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle and thought it was amazing, two other novels in and I'd be hard pressed to pick up another one of his. So great love and devotion to one story doesn't mean the author will always float your boat but for now at least Gaiman is still putting the wind in my literary sails.

Reading Lolita in Shelby

The title to this blog is a play on the title of another book "Reading Lolita in Tehran" by Azar Nafisi that is a non-fiction book about a book club that meets in Tehran to read banned books. As you can imagine there are many books banned in Tehran, I seem to recall that Pride and Prejudice was one, some seem very innocent to our western ideals, Lolita on the other hand, well I can kinda understand that. I just finished reading Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita, let me go ahead and say I enjoyed the book before I add that I can't completely fault those that would censor it. Lolita deals with a touchy subject, pedophilia (poor choice of phrasing there, but humorous enough not to change) and deals with it in a sensuous and at times comic manner. The narrator and protagonist is Humbert Humbert a pedagogical pedophile who, after spending time in several sanitariums, comes to live as a border in the home of a widowed women and her young daughter Dolores ("She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning... She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita.") Humbert is immediately enraptured by Lolita and begins trying to get as close to her as he can. I've heard in the media of young girls with older men referred to as Lolitas but as far as I know those girls were all older teens young Lo is but 12 when the story begins. That was one of the shocks that came with reading this story, a story that I had only a hazy idea of what it was about. The first misconception I had dispelled  as I began to read was that Nabokov was  a  Russian writer in the vein of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. While, yes, he was from Russia and had written in Russian Nabokov became an American citizen in the 1940's and taught at a number of American universities and wrote in English. Lolita wasn't translated from Russian it was written in English (the first shock, to keep with the theme) . The home where Humbert meets Lolita is in Virgina not some Eurasian metropolis. The second shock was the afore mentioned age of Lolita. The third was the sensuousness of Humbert's narrative concerning Lo, you'd read these wonderfully written lines about his passion for her and then remember he's talking about a kid and be disgusted with it. Something wonderful that Nabokov was able to pull off was making Humbert a sympathetic character without ever letting you forget he was a villain and a perv and more than a little insane with lust. Humbert is writing his memoir from a jail cell so all along you know the long arm of the law eventually catches up to him and he does at the end feel remorse for his actions, I think this is how Nabokov saves Humbert from absolute villainy. There's a great passage near the end in which Humbert relates a scene in which he has stopped on an over-look to get some air, this is after Lolita has left him, and he can hear the sounds of children playing rising from the city below and he writes -"I stood listening to that musical vibration from my lofty slope, to those flashes of separate cries with a kind of demure murmur for background, and then I knew that the hopelessly poignant thing was not Lolita's absence form my side, but the absence of her voice from that concord." Wow, isn't that amazing literature? He realizes that his real crime was stealing Lo's childhood away from her. It's writing like this that rises this book to 'classic' level and saves it from what, by all means, is a terrible idea for a story. There's a postscript on this edition written by Nabokov and I like that he says he doesn't write books with a purpose or to teach a lesson, he writes them for the "aesthetic bliss" of the story. He said he first had the idea for, an wrote, a short story about a pedophile who marries a sick widowed woman to get close to her daughter and that story then evolved into Lolita. As you may well imagine he had, at first, a hard time getting the book published and it was originally published by a French publisher in 1955. That was the final shock, that a book about a sexually active 12 year old (she had experimented with a boy and a girl) and her pedophile step-father touring the country together having romps in sleazy hotels and then her leaving him for another pedophile (yes there was an even worse villain than Humbert, and he gets his in the end too) was published in good old 1955. They say each generation thinks they've invented everything, all the swear words, all the lasciviousness, all the perverts but let's face it from the dawn of civilization there have been those making rules and those breaking rules. To quote a good cliche - there's nothing new under the sun. At the end of the story when Humbert is driving away from the scene of the murder (I'm not telling whose murder) he writes that he felt, "I had disregarded all laws of humanity, I might as well disregard the rules of traffic.", where upon he switches over to the left lane and drives until he wrecks, a last final act of anarchy that he calls an "almost spiritual itch". Again, wow, great writing. I look forward to reading more Nabokov, hopefully something without such a perverse nature.