Goin' Fishin'

Pa-pa and I have high hopes for the prospect of grandkid fishing. That's partly why, nearly two years ago, we picked up lock, stock, and barrel to relocate our lives half an hour south near Truman Lake.

We had reason to think this was a good idea. Our son Teebo and his boys, Heero and Beenie, were already spending a lot of time at our farm pond in pursuit of the wily schools of bass, which we introduced there as tiny baby fish many years ago. Beenie, particularly, has embraced the fine art of fishing to the point where he enjoys posing with his catch after reeling it in.

He has even learned to cast proficiently and to contemplate the pond bank patiently while waiting for his bobber to first rock and then sink.

With Beenie already hooked (pun intended), Heero not far behind, and the other two grandsons ready to play catch-up, Pa-pa deemed the time right to add this brand new beauty to our fleet:

This way we can introduce the boys (and maybe the two girls as well) to the joys of fishing in the lake for crappie (pronounced "KROP-ee," in case you are not from around these parts), undoubtedly the most delicious fresh-water fish to ever tantalize the taste buds of a human being.

John Lasseter, a Walt Disney filmmaker and executive, expresses concern about the frantic pace at which many kids experience childhood today. "I worry about kids today not having time to build a tree house or ride a bike or go fishing," he says. "I worry that life is getting faster and faster."

Pa-pa and I want to make sure that doesn't happen here at the lake. Since the kids now range in age from five to eleven, we hope to give them the chance to enjoy the recreational opportunities this area offers. We also hope these six keep us young enough to offer this opportunity to any additional grandkids that come along, including the one slated to arrive at the end of September.

We learned just this week that he is a boy--and we sure hope he will like to fish.

And the Winners Are . . .

You may recall from my previous blog post that, on Thanksgiving Day just past, twenty-four Christmas storybooks wrapped in festive holiday paper jumped into a red bag and headed home three hours away with four of my grandkids. Their mission was to open and read one together each night from Dec. 1 through Dec. 24, then let me know on Christmas Day which one each of them liked best. It was an Advent alternative to the popular chocolate candy version.

It was a job this distinguished panel of judges did not take lightly.

When the time came to tally the results and name the favorites, the vote ended in a tie. Sooby and Zoomie, pictured above on the ends, both chose Christmas Wonderland by Vilhelm Hansen, while Pooh and Bootsie opted for Santa's Toy Shop.

The way both books focus on Christmas preparations make them ideal reading as the nights count down to the holiday itself. Both have been around to entertain multiple generations of children with their imaginative characters; simple, uplifting story lines; and superb illustrations.

Christmas Wonderland, in particular, is a masterpiece of rich, detailed illustration. Published in 1981 and given to daughter Cookie by her aunt and uncle on the Christmas she was two, this masterpiece by popular Danish illustrator Vilhelm Hansen presents the delightful antics of a group of gnomes as they immerse themselves in all things Christmas.

Besides the artwork--which is, in itself, reason enough to open the book and share it with a child--another particularly engaging aspect of Hansen's book is the way he invites child listeners to answer questions. "Can you count how many birds there are in the tree?" he asks at one point, and "How many names do you know?"

Finally, many humorous situations arise when the gnomes go about their Yuletide business in unorthodox ways. For example, you might imagine how their decision to tune their fiddle using pliers and an oil can affects their Christmas caroling. Or what happens when they share a cup of hot tea with a snowman ("Ice cream would have probably been better."). Then there is the happy mess that occurs when mother gnome falls asleep and lets her rice pudding boil from the stove-top pots onto the kitchen floor.

Santa's Toy Shop, with its illustrations by The Walt Disney Studio, is a Little Golden Book from my own childhood. Published in 1950, it takes us to the North Pole where Santa and his elves are frantic to get all their toys made by their Christmas Eve deadline. Finally, with no time to spare, Santa loads his big bag with all the vintage toys I remember--including train sets, model airplanes, wooden alphabet blocks, checkerboards, and old-fashioned dolls (whose smiles we have seen him detail with a paintbrush).

Santa's one regret is that there is no time, after all this effort, for him to play with any of the toys himself. But the ever-resourceful Mrs. Claus whispers a solution in his ear as he departs from the North Pole: he should stop at the last house on his delivery route to engage in a little playtime along with his milk and cookies.

It was fun to sit here on those December nights and imagine how the kids' bedtime ritual was playing out, and we all agree that the Christmas Book Bag was a fun and worthwhile Advent project. Since I couldn't read the books with them in person, I had no choice but to revert to the less original version of the countdown, the one involving a piece of chocolate candy every night.

I tried not to let it bother me, though. A Googie has to do what a Googie has to do.


.

Metaphorical Musings

The poet in me loves metaphors. For me, the fresh, thoughtful comparison of something ordinary to something surprising involves the ultimate creativity. With metaphor, that comparison is implied rather than directly stated, and that makes it even more thought-provoking as a figure of speech.

For instance, if we describe Aunt Lucy as "the queen of Saturday night Bingo," that brings to mind a vivid mental picture of her--complete with crown, robe, and scepter--turning the drum to mix up all those little balls and then calling out, in her most regal voice, "B-4!" We find that interesting partly because the Bingo hall is about the furthest thing from a palace there could be. So we chuckle at that irony and think of Aunt Lucy in a fun and memorable new way.

Recently I happened on a list of "Quotable Quotations" about reading, and I couldn't help noticing how many of them use metaphor to compare books to other things. Because I have spent so much time reading books with the grandkids over the past eight years, I found these especially interesting, and here, right below one of our typical reading photos, I choose four of them to share with you.

 
According to a Chinese proverb, "A book is like a garden, carried in the pocket." What a great thought--that printed words are somehow like seeds that take root in fertile little minds. That the vitality of a writer's thoughts is something portable that can be worn on your person and go where you go.

This metaphor suggests that our time spent reading is an investment of sorts, with potential to grow beyond what we can imagine. No wonder Robert Louis Stevenson called his book of kids' poems A Child's Garden of Verses. I still remember "My Shadow" and "The Land of Counterpane," as seeds planted long ago in my own mind. I hope the time I spend with the kids in this little plot of land will someday come to similar fruition.

Garrison Keillor, of Lake Wobegon fame, claims that "A book is a gift you can open again and again." There is nothing children like more than presents. To think of a book as a gift is to acknowledge that it is something given out of love and with no expectation of reciprocity.

But a book is not the kind of thing that will break or run out of battery power. Unique among gifts, it has the potential to be opened numerous times and to offer a richness that only compounds with subsequent readings.

Who could be a better expert on the child audience than the great Walt Disney? "There is more treasure in books," he says, "than in all the pirate's loot on Treasure Island." Books become treasure chests, then, in Disney's view.

This is especially admirable coming from a man who made his fortune in the motion picture industry. But his comment here shows his understanding that, in order to have the movie, there must first be a story. Stories are treasures that we mine or discover with our kiddos when we read.  

For my last metaphor, I look to the great poet Emily Dickinson, who begins one of her poems with these lines: "There is no frigate like a book/To take us lands away." Here, a book becomes a vessel that transports us. It becomes a ship whereby we leave the land we know to sail to places of adventure and imagination.

A garden. A gift. A treasure chest. A ship. A book can be all of these things and more. I dearly love this time when the kids are all still young enough to want to help me plant seeds, unwrap presents, dig for treasure, and sail away.

I will close with a metaphor of my own: Books are boxes of Cracker Jacks. You open them to find things that can be sometimes sweet and sometimes nutty. But one thing is for sure: there is always a prize inside.