Which Proves This Is A Fairy Story

“And the sour-looking old woman paid the money in cash and on the spot, which proves this is a fairy story.” I haven't read L. Frank Baum's short story “The Queen of Quok” in years; the woman in question paid for the right to be queen as the kingdom was outright broke and the reigning king at the time this story begins was ten years old. This and eleven other tales by the author of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (important: The Wizard of Oz was the 1938 movie with Dorothy and the ruby slippers and has since lent its name to the book) were originally printed in American Fairy Tales from 1901 and it only took me a day to read it. Saw the Dover edition (ISBN 9780486236438) when I was in our local Barnes & Noble with Jeffrey from some father-son time and knew I would make it a point to get that! (Oh, I did pay in cash and on the spot for this Wednesday, along with two of the DC Comics Unleashes issues this month, starring Darkseid and Deadshot respectively!) I grew up on Baum's Oz stories, which I understand was just a tiny part of his full literary output, under many different names.

Kinda like W.C. Fields would open a bank account in nearly every town he performed in because he was so afraid of being poor and would register that account under an alias. Supposedly there's quite a bit of money sitting in banks and credit unions across the country that nobody can claim because Fields' master list of all his assumed names didn't go to an heir. So I've read. Speaking of credit unions, this morning before work Sarah and Jeffrey on their first of FOUR days off from school (Thursday and Friday there's a teacher's convention in Bismarck our state capital) I brought the kids to breakfast at our credit union for the celebration of International Credit Union Day. Pancakes with regular, strawberry, or blueberry syrup or peanut butter, chocolate chips, hot apple cider, orange juice, and of course coffee! I even sat down with them on the floor around a square glass table in Town and Country's waiting area until I had to get up. I'm not quite that un-limber yet, but my back feels it if I'm on the floor and not in a chair for too long …

Let's see, how to encapsulate Thursday into this piece (which I was GOING to release Thursday, but the computer putzed on me so many times I said “heck with it”) … the kids had fun with their days off from school, I'll say that, but I have to confess we were all ready for them to go back this Monday morning! Martha and I brought Sarah and Jeffrey to school and went in with them – something we don't do much since this year began because they don't want us to – to schedule the parent teacher conferences in fifteen days' time. Due to our work schedules, we can't make the usual after-school meeting for fifteen minutes with each of their teachers, so we got before-school sessions and look forward to them! I even got Jeffrey's ten minutes of reading per day in this morning because he wanted to, as I've been doing the last few weeks, writing an alphabetical list of prayer. First a person place or thing starting with “a”, then “b”, and so on … Jeffrey wanted to do a list of animals that way, and it's even written down in my journal today. I had to look up a few letters because I didn't want up repeating ourselves, so we came up with unagi, a Japanese eel; a veery, a type of thrush; you know what a wolf is;

a xantus, a Mexican hummingbird; a yapok which is another name for a water opossum, and a zander which is a variety of European perch. (And you say you don't learn anything from hanging out here!) So back to Sunday morning – I truthfully don't remember a heck of a lot about Saturday save Martha and Sarah both getting their haircuts done by one of Martha's coworkers at Trinity who also operates a hair salon southeast of town, my taking the kids to a fall bazaar at Congregational United Church of Christ where Jeffrey got a “magic hat”, Sarah a giant stuffed Garfield, and me an 1889 edition of the Edward Bellamy novel Looking Backward for whatever we chose to donate, and that I got to go to Bethany for Saturday's Breakfast with the Boys BY MYSELF because the kids got to stay overnight with Martha's parents and I didn't even have to pack their stuff and bring it over; they came after I got home! Seventeen of us at breakfast, fifteen stayed over for Bible study on Luke 18, the passage concerning the widow and the unjust judge. Especially verse eight; “I tell you that [God] will avenge them speedily. Nevertheless when the Son of man cometh, shall he find faith on the earth?”

Maybe I remember more about Saturday than I thought … now flash forward to Sunday morning, where due to the children's choir not singing at first service we elected to go to second service, which begins at 10:45 so we're headed to Sunday school first (that's at 9:30, with the kids going to class and me getting class ready – because the Boy Scouts who meet at our church know how to set up the room as they need it but evidently not how to “strike the set” when they're done, but I digress) and yesterday Dalyce and I had ten sixth-graders (irony: Dalyce last year was one too) and the lesson on David and Goliath went very smoothly. I think I had something the kids could more relate to which helped; I compared Goliath to any bully we face and David to the one who stands up to said bully. When we were reading through (the whole story is at 1 Samuel 17), one girl brought up that with all the armor Goliath wore to protect himself he must have not been very confident, figuring the Philistines would win by default because everybody would be too scared to face, figuratively, the biggest kid on the playground. Well, the biggest kid on the 'ground is no match for the One in authority over us all.

 

 

And that's not a fairy story, David