We Brought Home A Burning Building ...

... last night from Cub Scouts. Matt the den leader told me there was quite a crowd there, and it seems the main emphasis of the meeting -- something to learn other than each other's names, anyway, and the Law of the Pack -- was fire safety. Jeffrey was one of three kids to bring a cardboard skyscraper in flames home last night. Fortunately this was the day I had our Town and Country van so I could fit it into the back! Right now it sits in our garage, and dinner was pretty much whatever we scraped up.

Sleep was thankfully uneventful. When I came out ready to do the paper route this morning, though, I heard snoring on the couch and found Jeffrey down there scared because a bee was flying around in his room. As I REALLY wasn't fighting fatigue at the time, I went upstairs with him and caught the bee in a blanket, and our son fell right back to sleep. I got back after the route and went to bed myself before Martha woke up, helped Sarah with her shower, and headed out to work herself.

Though he didn't know it, moments like this were particularly important to him, for they were transforming him from a eager, confident naval officer with a ringing voice into an inert, though wary, zek. And only in that inertness lay the chance of surviving the twenty-five year of imprisonment he'd been sentenced to.

I'm guessing passages like this are why we didn't get to Alexander Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, the Russian expatriate's 1962 debut novel set in a Siberian prison camp excerpted in the back of our ... I believe it was our junior year English reader. Anyway, the story's a pretty easy read at 136 pages, paperback and the title character (not the naval officer, but a Russian soldier taken prisoner and later released by Germany in the eighth year of his sentence as a "traitor to his country")

Ivan Denisovich Shukhov ("Denisovich" is a middle name and a patronymic -- an identifier of one's father) is ... not exactly deep, but someone who knows what to do to make himself thrive even in a prison. The passage about the bit of sawblade is terrific ... at least, I found it so. Got the kids to school this morning and went back to bring the form so Jeffrey can CELEBRATE, now he too is getting his flu shot! So is Sarah. So is Martha (through her employer). Right now I just need to figure out when

I will, David