The RedMolly Picayune-Democrat

In search of a decent fairy tale

When we were growing up, one of my sister's and my favorite books was our mom's childhood copy of "Grimm's Fairy Tales." It was printed on that delightfully yellowish non-acid free stock, with odd line drawings scattered hither and yon throughout. And the stories were pretty much true to the originals--lots of juicy details like Cinderella's stepsisters getting their eyes plucked out by birds on their way to and from church... plus the best fairy tale ever, "The Pink," which climaxes in the evil chef being turned into a huge black poodle and forced to eat live coals from a shovel. Good times, good moral values for the under-twelve set.

So Rhys and I were at Borders today, looking for a new bedtime read-aloud book. (We just finished Farmer Boy last night). And I thought... hey, what could be better than a nice fat collection of classic fairy tales? A little Bros. Grimm, a little Andersen, perhaps a Perrault or two...

So while Rhys browsed the "forbidden" zone (Mama does not buy movie or TV-related books, but Rhys sure likes to hang around the racks wishing I did), I went over to the "fairy tale and mythology" section. My first tipoffs should have been: (a) they lump fairy tales and mythology together, and (b) said section takes up three teeny-weeny sections of shelves. There were a grand total of four books containing more than one fairy tale (not counting Best-Loved Princess Stories, oww, my aching fillings).  Naturally, every single one of them had pastel-pukey, faux-Disney style illustrations, and not one contained either "The Pink" or any of the cool gory variations on the Snow White/Cinderella/whatever stories. (Forcing an evil stepmother to dance in red-hot iron shoes 'til she falls down dead. Now that's literature.)

But on further reflection... Of course honest-to-goodness fairy tales are a dying breed. They're too violent and un-PC for the Left, and they smack too much of magic and unholy nastiness for the Right. They don't teach us a single thing about getting along with people from different cultures or pledging allegiance to the flagathaunidestays, about stewarding our environment or praising the Lord, about being strong empowered women or about minding our parents. Life in fairy tale-land is nasty, brutish and short, and the day goes to the cunning rather than to the kind or obedient. The only value of these stories is just that... they're damned fine stories.

So the search goes on. Powell's, Tattered Cover, Amazon... I will not rest 'til I find a big fat small-print collection of fairy tales in all their unbowdlerized glory. And then I will read them to the kids, or maybe I will hoard them for myself. And maybe some sunny winter Saturday I'll find Fisher sprawled across the bed, absorbed in the tribulations of the prince who had to climb the Glass Mountain or shaking his head at the perfidy of the Twelve Dancing Princesses or heck... shuddering with enthralled disgust at the fate of the coal-devouring giant poodle.

Just another day at the JTA

Well, our first official week of kindergarten is wrapping up nicely.

Here's what went on today:

8:30 Helmets up! Ride bikes to school with Fisher. Constantly harangue children re: need for increased speed, as the day is rapidly a-wasting. Upon arrival at school, discover that Fisher has apparently lost the key to his bike lock. Resist urge to lecture re: necessity of keeping track of one's own $#%@#!!! possessions. Leave bike (unlocked) and Fisher (on verge of tears) and return home.

8:50 Play Set. This is what we do every day. It's just not JTA without a game of Set.

9:10 Read from "A Child's Garden of Verses." Rhys is working on memorizing a poem to "speak" for Papa, Grandma and Grandpa next week. (Papa, you don't know anything about this. It's a surprise.)

9:30 Time for reading! By Rhys, not by me! Work on today's letters, "Kk" and "Tt." Realize Rhys doesn't know what a turkey looks like. (If you're supposed to circle the t-t-turkey and you think it's a b-b-bird, you're going to be SOL on the standardized test. Which he doesn't have to take this year.) Read a Bob book--wow! Rhys has made progress literally overnight in his ability to relate letters to sounds.

10:00 Go over the poem again.

10:10 Time to study two things we never have enough of: Time and Money. Rhys now knows how to tell time with the hour hand. Apparently, it never stops being funny to read from your workbook: "It's 4 o'clock." and then announce loudly, "No, it isn't! This book is silly!" We also learn that 1 penny is worth 1 cent, 4 pennies are worth 4 cents, Elmer's glue is limitlessly messy in the hands of a 5-year-old and a double handful of pennies from Papa's secret stash has 164 pennies in it. That's $1.64, because "cent" comes from the Latin word for "hundred" and thus we can remember that there are 100 cents in a dollar. (Don't worry, Papa. We put the pennies back.)

11:00 Whew! Time for some outdoor exercise. We ride bikes to the skate park. Rhys, after a couple of nasty spills, masters the bit where you come zooming down the curved concrete lip really fast and have enough momentum to swoop over the little rise back up to the flat part.

11:30 Lunch time! Chef Rhys prepares PB&Js for us both, almost all by himself. I am "the waiter," per his decree, and thus have to get the spoons out myself. Rhys, whose job this ordinarily is, expresses delight at the role reversal. The sandwiches are a bit smashed, but tasty. Papa calls and tells us he stopped by Fisher's school with a U-lock for his bike; Fisher's apparently still in a bit of a snit. The mailman stops by and asks about my car. He's particularly interested in its mileage (33 mpg, bay-bay!), and after he's gone, Rhys and I discuss why good gas mileage is important.

12:15 Got to soak up some history. We watch a History International show, TiVoed for our convenience, on the archaeology of Ptolemaic Egypt. We get out our Atlas of World History (Vol. 2: Middle Ages... Fisher was reading Vol. 1: Ancient World, and now we can't find it) and track down Alexandria on the map. Rhys is impressed by how far it is from Colorado. Also, the shape of the Roman Empire in Africa looks like a blaster. We learn what an obelisk is and what gargoyles are; Rhys wants to see more gargoyles, so we Google them and find lots of pictures thereof. I suggest drawing our own gargoyles, but Rhys has a better idea: sculpting them out of clay.

1:15 Off to Michael's we go, in search of air-drying modeling clay with which to build gargoyles.

2:00 Back from Michael's; Rhys asks if we can wait until Fisher gets home to make the gargoyles, because Fisher will be sad if he misses out. Mama is suffering from e-mail withdrawal and sets up Rhys with a Fisher-Price computer game so she can come tell all o' y'all about what happened today...

...at the JTA.

A missive from the trenches

We have survived the first day of school!

And we even remembered to take pictures!

So the morning started out with a family bike ride to Fisher's school. Nobody fell down, and everyone had fun.

(Don't worry, Mom--he wore a helmet, as did Rhys. You can't really see it in this picture, but it's in there hanging from the lock.)

Jim sneaked a few photos through the window once Fisher had gone in to class:

Then once we'd ridden safely home again, Rhys and I embarked on the first-ever official day of Jedi Temple Academy. We started off with a game of Set (at which Rhys more or less kicked my butt), then drove to Target to pick up a few odds and ends for the rest of the day. Including chalk, which Rhys insisted he needed for "real school" (the kind he plays with Fisher):

When math time was over, we did some much-needed home economics practice (we stripped the beds, washed the sheets and got dinner going in the Crock-Pot.) Then we needed some exercise! We decided to ride our bikes around the block five times... once again, accomplished without mishap. (Though we didn't actually make it to five. After four loops, Rhys had had enough.)

After that, we read part of one of our (many many) library books about knights--in particular, the section on heraldry. We brainstormed for a while and came up with a great design for our...

...homeschool coat of arms.

The castle represents home... it's a homeschool... no-brainer. The quill and scroll, writing and creativity. (And yes, it DOES look like a quill, not an errant leaf. Shut up.) The heart... luuuuuuv, of course. Awww. The book... I'll let you figure that one out for yourselves.

Then after a jointly-prepared lunch and a little quality Animal Planet time, it was time to do some handwriting practice (the only official curriculum we're using at this point--Handwriting Without Tears. Fisher's school uses the same program, and the quality of the kids' printing in his class last year was incredible.) Today: the amazing letters F and E!

And then after some messing about with scissors and a couple games of Toot and Otto, it was time to go pick Fisher up.

Which is when the poop hit the fan.

About five blocks from home and four blocks from Fisher's school, Rhys steered his bike into a pile of rocks on the side of the road... flew off his bike... and skidded to a halt on his face. He tore up his lips so badly I thought at first he'd knocked out a tooth. And because we were closer to school than home, we just had to keep riding so I could get him to the nurse's office and fix him up.

One tooth is rimmed in blood and awful wobbly-looking. Next few days should tell whether it's a goner or not... fortunately, it's a baby tooth.

But Fisher had a great day at school and Papa was there to see him at the end of the day, so he drove Rhys home and spared him the trauma of further bicycling misadventure.

(Fisher just came in and informed me Rhys has fallen asleep on the family room floor. Awwwww. If it makes him take a nap, we'll do six-hour school days every day.)

There's hope for the world yet

Two anecdotes will suffice.

Beloved Sweetie has been taking out some clients who want to move here from California--they're cowboy types, interested in finding property where they can comfortably house their five horses, six dogs, eleventy-something cats and three children. Friendly, earnest Christian folk, interested in knowing the types and quality of churches available around here (answer: many, and about the same as everywhere else). They've seen a few things they like and are getting ready (we cross our fingers) to make an offer.

But before they committed, Client Mom wanted to know one thing:

"Is there a racial problem here?"

Jim's Psycho Sensors were immediately triggered. But she went on:

"I really don't mean that like it sounds. What I want to know is: are people here going to have a problem with me having friends of all different kinds? Because what I look at isn't people's skin color or whether they're straight or gay, but whether they're a nice person. If you're a nice person, I'll like you and want to be friends with you; if you're not nice, I won't. And some people really have a problem with that."

She went on: "Like my brother. He's a white supremacist. He moved up to Idaho to be around other people like himself and cut off communication with the family; and I say good riddance if that's what he's going to believe."

And one more story:

On Friday, I was at the park with a bunch of other moms from my MOPS group. One of them, Shelley, I hadn't seen in a long time. I asked her how things were going... imagine my amazement when she said "Actually, we're moving to Fort Collins this Sunday."

Why? I wanted to know.

"Because I don't want my kids growing up thinking that the world is full of nothing but white people. It's much more diverse there and there are all kinds of different people, and I think that's a much healthier environment for them. They need to learn that what they are is not the default."

This, from a staunchly Christian, very very white woman whose parents are missionaries... cool...

Also: tomorrow is the first day back at Tope for Fisher, and the first day of Jedi Temple Academy for Rhys. Full report to follow. (Hold me. I'm scared.)

Take this waltz... please

The one that's stuck in my head. I don't even know if it's a real piece of music or not, but it's been firmly rooted in my head for about an hour now.

This possibly-fictive musical interlude was spawned by this quote from this week's New Yorker, in Justin Davidson's piece "Measure for Measure" about the mysteries of conducting:

After the artillery-fired fury of the first movement [of Shostakovich's Seventh Symphony], the second opens with a muted, shell-shocked waltz. To describe the shift in tone, Tilson Thomas intoned, "Meanwhile, in Madame Rupenskaya's dance studio..."

So, while I'm almost wholly certain that the waltz in my head is not from Shostakovich's Seventh Symphony, it seems to have a dragging wistfulness to it, an air of forced gaiety. Which is funny, 'cause that's kind of how I've been feeling all week.

Much Benham (tm) afoot tonight, perhaps. I'm supposed to go meet with the program director of KAFM and the programmer who has the same scheduled time slot as me, only on alternate Fridays (good lord, you'd think a self-described writer could come up with a succincter description than that). Our motive? To discuss the "future" and "direction" of the show. Which I haven't even freakin' done yet in any sort of official capacity. But I have a feeling that my musical tastes (beat-driven, lyrically complex, ranging in emotional tone from just plain snarky to ravening despair) may not be compatible with those of the show's Original Conceivers (um... lite jazz, blues and lots of jam bands).

And whereas one might think the easiest solution would be just to give me my own damn show and drop the facade of my covering someone else's gig... apparently some of the powers that be don't think that songs about drug addiction and serial killers are the best way to start our listeners off on a happy weekend. (Happy weekends? Pfaugh! Who needs 'em? Where would Emily Dickinson or Charles Dickens or Charles Bukowski or the Big Lebowski have gotten in life if they'd experienced nothing but one pleasant and relaxing freakin' weekend after another?)

Or something. I could be totally misreading the intent of this meeting. I have a tendency to assume that people hate me way more than they actually do. (Or maybe they're just really good at pretending they don't hate me. Is my paranoia showing?) We'll see how it goes...

...but if it goes at all non-suckily, guess what I get to do at 1 p.m. Mountain time on Friday?

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If you guessed "interview Nickel Creek live in the studio," then you are absolutely 100% correct! Zowie! Got any questions for 'em?

...edited some hours later... Hey, it went swimmingly. The Programmer in Question even invited me out for a drink. Smashing. Why am I so freaking paranoid?

Observations on parenting

Grandma and Grandpa took the boys over to their house today for some quality bike riding/hot tub paddling/Mythbusters watching time, so I got to go to the grocery store all by myself. (I love, I love, I love grocery shopping. Maybe more about that later sometime.)

For some reason, there was only one checkstand open when I got to the front of the store, so I spent several minutes quietly watching and listening to my flock of linemates. (Warning to the general public: Writers are everywhere. And we see, hear and ruminate on everything.)

Today's checkout line crop included a woman in a tent-like blue polo shirt with at least 20 Totino's (tm) Cheezy Party Pizzas stuffed into her cart (yes, I started counting... no, I couldn't finish counting, she kept moving), accompanied by her two children. The kids were just about Fisher and Rhys' age--the older, a boy, was perhaps a year or so older than Fisher--and they were experiencing the most common symptoms of Grocery Store Overload Syndrome. They were grabbing at the four hundred little kids'-eye level doo-dads that always crowd the cash register area... candies, Power Rangers, magazines about Jessica Simpson's enormous knockers, etc. She told them to cut it out. They gleefully ignored her. She said "One. Two. Three." They looked at her, looked back at the kiddie crack, and resumed their messing about. And up until this point, I'm feeling pretty darn sympathetic towards her. Kids acting up in grocery stores are kind of like Pap smears... you can avoid them successfully for a while, but sooner or later they're going to need to be dealt with.

Then the woman in front of her--also accompanied by two children of Fisherish and Rhysish size--turned around and said sympathetically, "I know how you feel... mine do this all the time."

And Blue Polo Mama said: "Yeah, and if they don't quit it, I'm gonna smack their little asses for 'em, and I don't give a rat's ass who sees me do it."

Unfortunately, I couldn't see Normal Looking Mama's face to see her reaction to this... alas, it must have been somewhat positive, because Blue Polo Mama continued:

"Makes me sick how people let their kids act all the time. They grab stuff in the grocery store and whine long enough for it, they'll buy it for them. But not me. I won't put up with that. I hate little bratty-asses." (This said as her older child loses interest in the candy display and starts, instead, bouncing around in the aisle so that people can't maneuver their carts around him. This behavior goes unremarked-upon. The younger child, meanwhile, comes and stands close to her mother and holds the hem of her shorts, as if seeking some reassurance that the tirade will soon be over and she'll be none the bruiseder for it.)

The rant goes on: "And my friends'll all do the same thing, too. Not like my mom. Her generation, they just let kids do whatever they want. Kids start crying for something in the store,  my mom says 'Why don't you just let 'em have it?' I just can't do that kind of hippie parenting. I'll just smack 'em if they need it."

At this point, fortunately for the continued health and safety of Blue Polo Mama, another checker came over and asked if I would like to repair to her newly opened checkstand.

As I drove home, there was a lump in my throat. Those kids would grow up convinced that they were brats, massive inconveniences to their ass-obsessed mother, worthy of nothing more than continued ignoring punctuated with random fits of violence.

I'm a strict mother... a self-described Mean Mama. But I hope my boys never have the feelings of worthlessness and sense of being doomed to failure that I saw in those little ones' eyes today. I hope even on the toughest days, they know that the sheer joy I take in their existence, my love of their goofiness and crazy-making questions and best-friend/worst-enemy sibling schizophrenia, outweigh by a million times the frustration and even rage that build up all day and pass in a moment.

And that no matter what, even on the busiest craziest day, if one of them comes up to me and stands still and tugs on my hem with big sad eyes, I'll stop whatever the hell I'm doing and give him a hug.

Even at the grocery store.

Good news for Renfairies everywhere

So today I got a wild hair/hare/heir. (Actually, I've seen all three of these things in the past 30 hours or so. There was a cute li'l brown bunny rabbit meandering through the woods when I took the boys for a nature walk yesterday... I've neither bathed nor brushed my hair yet today, mm stinky, but read on to learn why... and my children are, as we speak, dismantling the kitchen with great energy.)

Jim and I watched a cool show the other night. (It is scary how many of my anecdotes/descriptions of how I came to know something start with that same sentence.) It was about the Borgias, they of Renaissance Roman infamy, and particularly about how they probably didn't do a lot of the nasty things attributed to them, though there was a whole slew of nasty things that they did do. And one of the things that I learned was that Lucrezia Borgia, she of the supposed incestuous relationship with her father/brother/whomever and the apocryphal arsenic-laced ring, was deeply madly passionately in love at first sight with her second husband, Alfonso of Naples. Not something you think about much, the idea of Renaissance child-brides actually loving their husbands. (Or vice versa.)

Then today I got an e-mail from Renaissance Magazine talking about their upcoming special issue on Scotland... and at the end, they mentioned that their annual special issue on Weddings is coming out in March.

So I did about 15 minutes worth of additional digging and put together a query for them on Renaissance love-matches. And my darling Herm read over it and pronounced it Interesting Enough. And I sent it away.

And about an hour later, I got an e-mail back from the editor, saying that they would be pleased to read that article and anything else I might like to send them...

*jig jig*

This is one of those subbacultcha-type magazines that I love and read obsessively. I may not have the makings of a true SCA nut, but I can argue avidly about the finer points of Elizabethan-era fairy beliefs with the best of 'em. Or the moderately-interested of 'em, at least.

But anyway. The reason I've not yet bathed today is because I've been engrossed in multifarious correspondence with...

....drum roll....

the members of the new editorial board of Digital Scrapbooking, coming to you in an all-new subscription-based quarterly format in January.

I really wanted to be able to link to the magazine Web site, but it's not up yet... stay tooned... all I can tell you at this point is it's gonna ROCK and/or ROLL. And I'll probably have a new digital scrapbooking-themed blog to go along with it. But the Pic-Dem will remain and persevere.

(Wow. A real job. I feel a little... faint.)

And now, a musical interlude

*crickets*

Guess what? Crickets do in fact appear in this musical interlude, which is the show I'm doing tonight at KAFM 9-midnight.

'Cause I discovered that it is not only effective, but also funny to replace expletives with cricket noises.

So turn on, tune in and toke up. It's the Drinking and Drugs show, baby! Requests are always welcome during the show... 970-243-8801.

Also, here's the scoop on the guy who pissed me off:

I posted some writing. Not, perhaps, the great American novel, but I rather liked it. And he (a Published Novelist, woo freakin' whoo) DUMPED on it. Rudely, cruelly and with no sense of what a critique actually consists of. Me, were I to read something so utterly not to my taste, I would probably just not say anything about it. But he was full of irritability and rude comments, and apparently the Piss Fairy had paid an extra-special visit to his Cheerios that morning, so I just happened to cross paths with him at the wrong space/time juncture.

ANYWAY. So I went around all teary/angry/ready to shred my writing and set ink to paper nevermore for about two hours. Then I went back and re-read his comments and was upset all over again. But this time, I had gotten new comments from someone who is also a Published Novelist.

And SHE quite liked it. And said so. And pointed out the one thing that wasn't working for her, and hey, she was right; I posted this little chunk o' literaryness not for accolades, but to find out what I could change to make it better.

So I went to Amazon, feeling a little better but still a bit steamed, and looked up both of their books.

And guess what? His are all (a) out of print, (b) rife with extremely negative reviews or (c) both. And hers are (a) very much in print, (b) well-reviewed and (c) going to be purchased by me for our next round of bedtime reading (after we finish Farmer Boy).

In the immortal words of my roommate Ama, "Neener neener, you whore."