Magpie's Page

The letter that came home from school yesterday was so much better than the head lice letter last month, so much better that I feel compelled to share a redacted copy of the letter with you.

I think, on close reading of this letter, that the principal has a sense of humor.

"...we hired a trapper to catch and sacrifice the bat...unfortunately, the bat escaped."

The last line is also divine:

"I feel the need to communicate with you, however, and thus I am notifying you."

On the other hand, maybe I have a warped sense of humor and no chiroptophobia, and the principal has too much time on his hands?

I was rooting around on the computer looking for something, and I ended up browsing through a mess of photos that I hadn't seen in a while.

Mir has a cousin, a girl cousin who is a year and three-quarters older than she is. For a long time, said girl cousin has been the source of nearly all of Mir's clothes. Now, today, at almost five and soon-to-be seven, the two girls are nearly the same size, and the hand-me-down supply channel is drying up.

But back when this photo was taken (by my sister), Mir fit into the little dress, and her cousin fit into the big dress (and her cousin had worn the little dress previously, and Mir wore the big dress later). The dresses aren't the same, aren't from the same company or anything, but they're birds of a feather. And the two little blonde girls, wearing them at the same time, might well have been sisters.

Don't ask me why, but the child has an obsession with lava. Walk down the sidewalk, "step over the hot lava, mama!". "Ooh, that's hot lava!" It comes up a lot.

So, I thought nothing of it when she told me she wanted to be Lava Girl for Halloween. Lava Girl, a superhero of her own devising. Lava Girl, to be attired in a red dress and pink cape and black tights and "oh, my pretty new shiny ballet slippers" and a red wig or "no, my own hair, mama" with a diamond crown. You know, Lava Girl.

On my way back into the office after lunch, I got off the elevator at the costume shop. When J. put down the phone, he asked "So, what's Mir going to be for Halloween?" "As a matter of fact, that's what I'm here about." I told him she wanted to be Lava Girl, and I was about to launch into the description of the costume, and he derailed me. "I know, Lavagirl and Sharkboy, she wears a jumpsuit".

Go figure. There actually is a Lavagirl. Not the Lava Girl of my child's invention, but a Lavagirl nonetheless.

Once we got past that, he took me to their wondrous cabinets of fabric, and gave me yards of stuff: sparkly fuchsia voile for the cape, luscious tangerine slubby satin for the "L" emblem and some accents, and persimmon taffeta for the dress.
I guess it's time to get out the sewing machine and turn myself into superhero Sewing Mom.

One of the books I've read in the last year was Life Is Meals: A Food Lover's Book of Days. It's a charming mish-mosh - a remembrance here, a recipe there, all short pieces organized by date. Because of the eclectic nature of the day book entries, there's no urgency to the reading of it. You can dip in and out because there's no thread to maintain.

Anyway.

The entry dated 6 October is titled "Gleaning" and it retells the story of Ruth (who picked up barley left behind after the harvest) and it talks of helping the poor through the salvage of potatoes left behind in the field and it moves on to how much food is wasted by supermarkets and restaurants and it finishes with the authors picking up potatoes fallen from trucks and taking them home for dinner. "It's just a way of allowing them to realize their true destiny."

"Gleaning" reminded me of the year that my brother was a senior in college and I was an impoverished graduate student, and he was living in a campus apartment, and his school had a field that they leased in little sections as a community garden to folks who'd drive out from Philadelphia to tend to their produce. By October, most of the "farmers" had abandoned their plots to the impending winter, and my brother and his roommate went foraging through the still productive plots. They filled up their freezer with tomato sauce made with vegetables they harvested, and I went to visit one weekend and came home on the train to NYC with tomatoes and leeks and beets and carrots, and filled up my freezer too.

Waste not, want not.

The highway.

The slow way.

The medium sized way.

When we get in the car to go someplace, sometimes we have to get on the highway. If you want to be precise about it, it’s the parkway, as opposed to the Expressway or the Thruway (which ought to be the Dew Way, because after all it’s really the Thomas E. Dewey Thruway, and spelling it “thru” is an abomination, but I digress). Anyway, I call it the highway.

One day, Miss M. chirped up after I’d gotten off the highway and said “now we’re on the slow way?” Sure kid, local roads are slow, therefore “slow way” works for me.

Last week, we went to visit my mother. At some point, we were off the highway and the child was perturbed that I wasn’t going faster, stuck as I was behind a large yellow truck. Finally, the truck turned off, leaving the road in front of me free and clear. She encouraged me to speed up. I said “No, I really can’t, it’s not that kind of a road”, because it wasn’t.

Says she, “I wish we were on the medium-sized way. “

What slays me about this whole naming of roads is that she’s allocated three different measurement schemes to her one classification of the road system, mixing metaphors if you will.

Poetic license at age four? Because keeping all the measurements consistent is so boring:

What do you call the opposite of the highway?