The Trolls of Yesterday and Other Stories

I walked to Broadway Used Furniture yesterday (when it was in the sixties and today with up to 65 mph winds and dim and dreary outside I would not dare) because I needed to meet Karn who co-owns the business with her husband Terry. I didn't see her and didn't have time to stay, that thirty minute lunch break you know, but I took a stroll through the store's used book section – not very big, but you never know what's going to stand out to you. I'd already found a wooden figurine of a modern rabbi, and I so liked it I bought that as well as three books I thought would interest the kids all for two bucks. Then … I cheated on my CINCH meal plan and bought a lunch to bring back to the office. Guilty!

One of the titles I read I misread as The Trolls of Yesterday and this morning thought it something good to fit into my National Novel Writing Month story next month (don't know how yet) and I found one book I remembered reading when I was a kid … probably in second grade, which would be 1979-1980 for me. It was a Weekly Reader edition of Adelaide Hall's One Kitten For Kim (LOC 69-15799, so numbered because it was published in 1969, the pre-ISBN era) about the title character with a cat and seven kittens whose parents insisted he give six of the kittens away. He does so, and every time he gives away a kitten he gets a pet in trade. It's just so funny, especially to me.

For when I first read this I remember thinking of my niece Kimberly (who bears the distinction of being my oldest niece, older than my wife Martha by three weeks) and not quite discerning whether Kim in the story was a boy or a girl … now that I think on it after having re-read the book yesterday, it's still hard to tell from Don Madden's illustration. With or despite Kim's short shorts and long legs and bowler haircut, I believe the consensus is he's a boy. But it's not as though dual-gender clothing is unusual; indeed, men portraying women in media goes back to at least the ancient Greeks. Shakespeare and his contemporaries are remembered for using males and boys for every role in a play.

With its grace and carelessness it seemed to annihilate a whole culture, a whole system of thought, as though Big Brother and the Party and the Thought Police could all be swept into nothingness by a single splendid movement of the arm. That too was a gesture belonging to the ancient time. Winston woke up with the word “Shakespeare” on his lips.

Of course, if the current CBS “reality show” Big Brother got annihilated this way it would be replaced with something more annoying, but I digress. (The quote's from George Orwell's novel 1984 by the way.) It would be hard if not impossible from the Stephen Lambert illustrations to confuse men and women in Beverley Birch's re-tellings of Hamlet, Antony and Cleopatra, Othello, and The Tempest in the 2002 work Shakespeare's Tales (ISBN 0340798912) I got to read and finish on our way to Bismarck this weekend. Most of the play's dialogue gets worked into the story – you know, the stuff you had to memorize in senior English (I got to recite Hamlet's “to be or not to be” soliloquy when we got to Shakespeare, second six weeks) and I hated to see them end. I'm told you should see Shakespeare performed live to really “get it”, but so far I haven't.

UNHEALTHY! That was our daughter Sarah's clarion call after we got home last night and enjoyed chicken and fries for dinner, and she was ready to throw out the cupcakes and snacks and other not so good for us foods we already had. But it was late, and Martha suggested a compromise (it won't be late for our kids the next two nights, darn it – the North Dakota Educators Association has a conference in Bismarck tomorrow and Friday, so they get to stay up); finish with what we already have, sparingly, that is not “healthy” and agree to not buy any more. We can do this. Really. I'm just impressed our six- year-old is coming up with it!

With our five-year-old (Jeffrey), he needs to be challenged to try. He brought home some sheets with a pumpkin he's supposed to color and put together, an assignment he'll have to do over the weekend because he got frustrated doing it at school and threw it away because he doesn't like coloring very much, he only scribbles when he does. His teacher put a note to “David and Martha”, signed it with her name because she and Martha grew up together, urging him to work on it so he'd have a pumpkin to hang up as well. And we found out about THIS just as he was going to sleep.

ME (to JEFFREY in bed): Jeffrey, you're an Alvin; you can do anything!

JEFFREY (rising in bed to face ME): Like the cartoon character?

ME figuring out what he's referring to as I didn't hear that; looking quizzically at him.

JEFFREY (to ME): Like Alvin! Of Alvin and the Chipmunks!

ME (in an oh-I-get-it moment): Yeah, like Alvin! He does everything!

SARAH (from her “bed” on the floor at the edge of her room): You know, Dad, Alvin is a cartoon character. He's not real.

ME (to SARAH): Sarah, I know he's not real, but fictional characters can inspire us too … [and I trailed off knowing I wasn't going to get this easy enough for them to understand]

But they do understand a lot already, David