Sarah On The Susan Constant

WORD COUNT: 36,230

Well, our daughter Sarah couldn't have been on that ship with sailed from England to Massachusetts Bay and led to the founding of Jamestown in 1606-1607 for among the seventy-one crew and passengers were no women (or girls). But this morning among the classroom assignments she's had to turn in – and missed Monday because she was unwell – were her requirement to make three journals entries during the voyage. And she did a great job on that and her four (!) other assignments due today that she was up late last night and early this morning completing; there was also a fictional animal she had to draw and color, a draft of three paragraphs on how to cook a turkey, and two others that escape me right now. It's just a matter of getting her started and then she does quite well.

But she can work herself into a tizzy afraid of what people will think if it's not her “best”.

Especially her teacher Mrs. Perrin, she really likes Mrs. Perrin. It was one of her diary entries about the captain getting sick and parts of his beard falling off – how a kid in the early 17^th century would have seen his losing facial hair in public I'm sure – that inspired me to think of Stickybeard, the pirate villain from Codename: Kids Next Door who stores the candy in his beard that could … fall … out. Man, that's unsavory. About as much so as the “flat meat biscuit”, one of Gail Borden's early inventions two centuries later that was bought by the U.S. Army and various explorers, but by the average citizen no way. Until he came across with his next idea of condensing milk, which you may notice next time you're grocery shopping in the baking goods section.

You know, Borden Condensed Milk.

Graham crackers, Reader's Digest, Monopoly – they and their creators all had long roads to hoe. And in Nathan Aaseng's 1989 book The Rejects: People and Products That Outsmarted The Experts (ISBN 0822506777) you'll see a variety of goods and services that are almost too familiar today but they either weren't always ideas whose time had come or they were and it sounded so much like something that already existed there had to be a certain twist to it. And certainly all of the products and services here (table of contents: Graham Cracker, Borden, Reader's Digest, Birdseye, Monopoly, Xerox, Lear Jet, Orville Redenbacher, Federal Express) have changed over time, but there were parts of their stories I certainly didn't know!

Parker Brothers gave Monopoly's developer 52 reasons why it wouldn't work.

Reason 53 was that it did. This morning I got the second of three packages from my brother Bob in Florida with our father's things. Various plaques and pins and newspapers and photos came in two clear totes – I opened them and took a brief look, but that's about it. I figure after the Thanksgiving worship service we're going to at Christ Lutheran Church we'll take and have more time to go through in detail. I had forgotten how fine and clear my dad was before his series of strokes, and there are parts of his life I feel I missed out on because I wasn't listening. Getting a bit of that treatment with my own kids, aren't I? I mean, no matter how much I play at the park with Jeffrey and hear Sarah out when she needs someone who's not her mom to listen, there are moments I blow it that I'll never get back.

So I need to make the most of the time I have left.

Happy Thanksgiving,

David