Monday, March 19, 2007
A trickle of Schmaltz
Once upon a time, there was a leprechaun named Abe?. I got a good laugh this weekend when I sat down Sunday evening with my nine year old son ,taking a look at his school work of the past week. He seemed excited, taking out the folder himself, then pulling out a story he had written (in not half bad cursive) which had our favorite Celtic anomaly as a leaping off point. It didn't take me long to recognize that all the characters had names of familiar classmates who had earned a place in the tale by their virtue or lack off such. My adult brain immediately envied what I haven't done for a long time,which is,to lord over a scathing parody of a world I completely controlled the destiny of. Actually this isn't very high up on my list, but my envy was real. In the question and answer to follow I learned that most if not all of the kids had done something similar and had even haggled with each other to be portrayed in this way or not using' literary retaliation ' as a common bargaining chip. If the stakes had been any higher who knows how many parents and administrators would have become involved. Well, they all lived as dysfunctional as ever, after.
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2 comments:
I thought your post was going to be about chicken fat, perhaps anticipating the coming of Passover. But I'm thrilled to find a leprechaun at the end of the trickle instead.
I may have told you this by phone or on the THS site, but Jonah pulled a 5-year-old "Lord Over A Scathing Parody" number a couple of months into kindergarten. It's one of my favorite child moments ever:
He came home from school a little down. To Penny's question about how the day was, he said, "Not that good, Mom." To further prompting, he said that Mrs. Dillard had hurt his feelings. How? Well, it seems that at some point during the day, she had mentioned that "Rows One and Two are doing a good job... but Rows Three and Four are Not Being Good Kindergarteners." Hmmm.
So Penny asked what Jonah and his fellow three- and four-dwellers had been doing. "Oh, everybody was screaming and running around. But I wasn't! I was just sitting there!" Ah, the lumping together of victims, a seminal public-school experience. But...
Is that all? "No. Later, I didn't finish in time when we were sorting shapes." Really? But you're good at sorting shapes. "Yeah, but I wasn't really paying attention." Why not?
"Well..."
[big, brown-eyed earnest look]
"...I wasn't paying attention because I was busy making up a mean song about Rows One and Two." [Penny squashes laughter] A mean song? How did it go? "Oh, I can't remember it all, Mom. It was really long. It had all the kids' names in it."
If there be any who still wonder about the purpose or utility of Art, I give thee Jonah Wilder Howard, creator of mean songs.
Dear fellow'amazed'father, thank-all-goodness,that there are kids out there who talk to their parents. We obviously still have so much to learn that didn't figure in our paradigm. I still don't like fish, but avacados thats another story all together. Fish stink and their haeds flop around when beheaded, Avacados are just green and have a strange name.
SPH
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