Polycarp, The King's Giraffe

Oh, in the book The King's Giraffe (ISBN 0689806795) by Mary Jo & Peter Collier and illustrated by Stéphane Poulin I don't believe the animal given as a gift by Mehemet Ali, Pasha of Egypt to King Charles [the Tenth] of France was even given a name. [It's Zarafa, I just read.] I'm sure he had one; I'm certain Abdul the pasha's stable boy who traveled with the giraffe from Egypt through France to Paris for the pasha's gift to be placed in the Royal Menagerie called the giraffe some proper name. [Zarafa.] Not a bad gift in return for Charles' gift to Mehemet Ali of a printing press! True story.


God willing, today the flu bug that's been making people all over our area in the last few weeks feel useless for a day or two will be gone from our house! This morning when I left for work Martha was curled up in bed, for at about four this morning she got up to throw up -- I didn't see it myself, but it wasn't pretty. Sarah's bout was over this past weekend, mine was Tuesday and Wednesday, and Jeffrey's was the week before. And for Martha and me anyway, the queasiness is accompanied by chilling chills. I hope she will understand.


Being a journalist -- one who writes in a journal, not someone who writes for a newspaper -- myself, I can appreciate the book Minot Public Schools chose for this year, Melissa Thomson and Frank Morrison's Keena Ford and The Second-Grade Mix-Up (ISBN 9780142413968) because it's told from a first-person point of view. And I certainly don't expect a second-grader to distinguish lies of omission and lies of commission -- the mix-up comes from Keena writing her birthday day first then month -- especially when birthday cake is involved.


That makes my ethics sound nonexistent, doesn't it? Eh, I'll ask Polycarp, the Christian disciple who's commemorated today on his death day in the mid-second century when I get to heaven for some improvement in that area if I think about it. The bishop of Smyrna who is best known for his letter to the Philippians (about eighty years after Paul's) as well as dying at eighty-six but being as hard to kill as Rasputin (authorities tried to burn him at the stake but the fire wouldn't consume him, then he was stabbed in the heart and his blood put out the fire) would have some great stories to tell.


Polycarp was one of John's original disciples. John who was one of Jesus' original disciples. The links in the chain of twenty centuries of Christianity are already forming, and they still are today. I can see that in teaching fifth graders the story of Ruth with puppets and manning the Tigger Toss booth at our annual Sunday School Carnival this past Sunday. We were at Bethany's second service on Sunday because we had to pick up Jeffrey from his FIRST overnight sleepover for his friend Kaden's overnight birthday party, and our son was bounding out of his skin for days before!


Granted, I don't think either Martha or I realized it WAS his first sleepover outside of family until he said something. At least I'm hopeful he will not start "snarking out", a term for sneaking out early in the morning and getting back before your parents know you've gone, the way he sleeps at night and I fight to wake him some days! Daniel Pinkwater's novel The Snarkout Boys & The Avocado of Death (ISBN 0451158520) made me think it was written by someone at MAD Magazine; the cover reminds me of one of their illustrators at least.


Part mad scientist cautionary tale, part alien conspiracy, part ... parting my hair, really (the main characters high schoolers Walter Galt and Winston Bongo good at being awkward remind me a little bit of ME at their age!) -- it may not even be a thoughtful kind of funny, but when you're a kid everything around you looks REALLY BIG and adults generally like they don't know what they're doing! That ever popular Admiral Ackbar meme "It's A Trap!" has more meaning for me at forty-four years of age than it ever did at eleven when I first saw Return of the Jedi!


I must sit down for I'm having a flash back, David