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.

A Mickey Mouse Operation

If you hear something described as "Mickey Mouse," that might not be complimentary. Maybe it refers to a college course that was too easy, or a procedure considered incompetent or ineffective.

But neither of those meanings refers to the operation Pa-pa and I got to share with little Heero last night. In our case, "Mickey Mouse" describes hats, plates, napkins, and cups featuring pictures of Walt Disney's lovable rodent. These wonderful decorations expertly celebrated the fact that our youngest grandson turns two years old today.

I, for one, was happy to see our party table alive with the Mickey Mouse theme. I cut my own teeth on "The Mickey Mouse Club" back in the late 1950s and early '60s, when that iconic black and white TV program (under the leadership of a big mouseketeer named Jimmy) burst like a party into my living room every afternoon. I even had my own hat with those furry felt ears.

But--tempted as I am to take off on a one-way trip down Memory Lane here, I will resist (for now, anyway) and keep the focus on our birthday boy. Here, you see him preparing to extinguish the candles on his birthday cake (frosted orange, by his decree).

Happy birthday, little guy! As you hit the two-year marker, Pa-pa and I love watching you learn and grow. You amaze us with the things you can do, say, and figure out at barely two years old. We had a great time at your party and hope you and brother Beenie enjoy all your new toys--your "puter," Sesame Street letter puzzle, farm set, and mega blocks--and I'm sure there will be more to come as your birthday unfolds through the day.

Let me close with those infamous words of the mouseketeer song. "Now it's time to say goodbye to all our company: M-I-C (See ya real soon!) K-E-Y (Why? Because we like you!) M-O-U-S-E." Karen and Cubby got it right, little guy.

Happy second birthday, Heero. Pa-pa and I look forward to helping you celebrate many more.

Pinata!

A dizzy kid staggers blindfolded across the basement floor and slices the air repeatedly with a plastic boat paddle. It doesn't take long for the rest of us to figure out that this may not be the safest environment. So we artfully back away, dodge the swings, and cringe when the oar catches an unsuspecting laundry basket with a resounding "SWACK."

It seemed like such an innocent thing--a brand new pinata sitting there on a garage sale table with a price tag touting it as a $1 bargain. One dollar--really?

Pinatas like this go for $20 or more at Wal-Mart during holiday seasons. With Halloween fast approaching, I really had no choice but to scoop up this little prize, shaped like the head of a Mardi Gras clown clad in the most inviting greens, yellows, and lavenders. It was a no-brainer--this fall season my grandkids would experience a little cultural diversity along with their Halloween candy.

According to www.pinapinatas.com, we owe the joys of pinata smashing mostly to China, where paper was invented, and Mexico, where pinatas were prominent in religious celebrations. With the Mayans (those fun lovers) the blindfold was added, and the pinata achieved party game status.

The various cultures differ in the symbolism they attribute to the pinata. The Chinese filled theirs with seeds to represent abundance, while some of the Mexican peoples broke clay pots filled with small ornaments as offerings to their gods.

In some later incarnations the pinata stood for evil for those wielding sticks to demolish, while other times participants "looked up" to the hanging pinata as a symbol of hope. Today, people all over the world break pinatas just for the pure fun of it. These papier mache creations bring to parties and celebrations a suspenseful game allowing adults to take out their frustrations in a socially acceptable way and children to simply wait for candy to drop from the sky.

Anyway, here you see Sooby, Pooh, Bootsie, and me with our clown while he was still intact. If you squint, you can see that Pa-pa has already established himself at a safe distance, and little Zoomie, in a burst of premonition, had already hightailed it out of Dodge.

The fifteen or so minutes following the snapping of this photo were a blur of swinging weapons and flying tissue paper. No children or adults were harmed in the execution of this activity, though, for the life of me, I will never figure out why.

However, I am sad to report that the little boat oar standing there so proudly beside Pooh did not survive the second round, during which Pooh smashed it unceremoniously into the floor. When it was replaced by the only handy thing--a metal pole--our insurance rates all went up a bit.

But eventually, primarily through damage inflicted by Sooby and Pooh, our clown littered the floor with candy and little boxes of raisins and apple juice. (I figured that, as the kids were recovering from any injuries, they would at least have some healthy snacks to speed along their convalescence.) The kids launched into "grabbing" mode, and, surprisingly, the plunder came out pretty well divided among the pirates.

Our pinata experience is one we will not soon forget. It was a lot of fun, or at least I think it was. Since we have all lived to tell about it, this is another one of those stories I expect to attain mythic proportions as we re-tell it through the years.





 

October Passages

Sometimes I fall into the habit of checking text messages early in the morning before I am even fully awake and out of bed. When I did that this morning, it was with this startling image that I opened my eyes to a new day:

That's nice, I thought sleepily. The kids have carved a jack-o'-lantern. No, wait a minute--that's Bootsie! She's lost her first tooth!

This came as somewhat of a surprise, considering that this pretty girl had her fifth birthday only two weeks ago today. If I remember correctly, this rite of passage came considerably later with the other kids. Sister Sooby lost her first tooth when she was a few months older, comparatively, and brother Pooh even later than that.

I have read that nothing makes a child feel more like a big kid than losing baby teeth. Even starting school and learning to read take a back seat. Today, Bootsie joins the ranks of the big kids, leaving only little brother Zoomie and cousins Beenie and Heero with full sets of baby teeth intact.

A couple weeks ago Pa-pa and I made an overnight road trip out to deliver our present (foam Sofia the First and Amber dolls with a full wardrobe of design-it-yourself princess fashions) and to wish Bootsie a happy birthday in person. Glorious autumn foliage greeted us all along the three-hour drive, and our visit, as so often happens, was a big two-day party full of games and hugs and pure revelry in the joy of being grandparents to four great little kids.

So, Bootsie, consider this your official fifth birthday blog post. The years are whizzing by, the seasons somersault one over another, and you are growing up so fast. You are one of the big kids now, and when you start kindergarten next fall, you just may be greeting your teacher with a whole mouthful of brand new teeth!

Teddy Defies the Odds

The minute I saw him on the store shelf during the 1986 Christmas season, I knew I was a goner.

Never mind that this was the most impractical Christmas gift ever for a four-year-old child. Never mind that it cost way too much. The minute Teddy batted those huge animatronic eyes and crooned, "Come dream with me tonight . . . ," I was ready to hop in the airship myself and fly away.

Manufactured by Worlds of Wonder, Teddy Ruxpin was an animated teddy bear who was activated by cassette tapes inserted under his tunic. Once the tapes began (I never understood why they ran backwards, by the way), Teddy's eyes would blink open and shut and his mouth would move in sync with the stories and music they contained.

Each tape came with a storybook, and an audible signal would inform children when to turn the pages. Through Teddy, we all met a delightful cast of characters that included the Woolly Whats-It, along with Teddy's best bud, Grubby the octopede, and their scientist friend, the aptly named Newton Gimmick.

Although Teddy's popularity skyrocketed in the mid-1980s, that fame fizzled out just about as fast, mostly due to the unfortunate timing of his arrival on the toy scene. Even early on, Teddy  bounced from company to company as he struggled to rise above a plummeting stock market.

He also had the misfortune of being a tape-playing machine arriving on the cusp of the compact disc era, and therefore was doomed before he could get a good paw-hold. Adding to the problems were the facts that his four C batteries tended to deplete rapidly, making upkeep even more expensive, and his mechanism was especially sensitive to damage.

Furthermore, consider the way four-year-olds generally treat their teddy bears. Is it really a good idea to give them an expensive piece of sensitive machinery and hope for any kind of good outcome? Think about it.

Although daughter Cookie was pretty careful with Teddy, he still went through batteries like a herd of cows through small bales of hay in the dead of winter. (It didn't help that his switch often got left in the "on" position.) Then, eventually, his animated features stopped working, forcing him to tell his stories like a ventriloquist with his eyes shut. But even then I couldn't stand the thought of getting rid of him, so he found a home for many years on a shelf in the bedroom closet.

That is, until just this past summer. To my delight, it seems that Bootsie, four years old herself, took a shining to Teddy, who, despite the fact that his eyes and mouth are frozen shut, still tells a story as well as ever. During the week that Bootsie stayed with me in July, this was a common sight:

An so, with nearly thirty years under his tunic, Teddy lives to entertain another generation of children in my house. That is pretty amazing, and I am so glad I didn't give up on him.

Our Fair Friend Otto

By the time the state fair pulls into our town every August, the kids and I already have a mental list of the things we will do. We will gaze down from the top of the Ferris wheel to see buildings that look like Legos, and people and cars that appear no bigger than toys.

We will go to see the "butter cow," hand-sculpted from hundreds of pounds of butter, in its refrigerated compartment of the dairy bar. And, of course, we will talk to Otto.

Otto will talk to us, too, because that's what Otto does. He is, after all, a talking car. Specifically, he is a 1931 Model A Ford roadster of the kind formerly used by the Missouri State Highway Patrol. Every year, Otto comes to his special open-air garage in the fair's Highway Gardens to converse with children about any variety of topics, safety-related and otherwise.

Most fortunately, daughter Cookie captured last month's visit to Otto in a rare digital moment that includes me and all six grandkids:

There, totally immersed in as deep a conversation as you can have with a hunk of metal, are, from left to right, Sooby, Bootsie, Googie (no, I am not a midget; I am on my knees), Beenie, Beenie and Heero's mama, Heero, Zoomie, and Pooh (who, microphone in hand, is acting as our spokesman).

As I understand it, Otto first came to our fair in the late 1960s. He not only talks (with appropriate help from a trooper with a remote device) but also blinks his eyes and honks. As you leave his garage, he will see that the kids all get a T-shirt and a coloring book. What's not to like about a guy who can do all that?

Like Smokey the Bear in the Conservation Building and the llama in the petting zoo, Otto wears one of the iconic faces of our fair. He is a true personality, complete with jokes and teasing and the occasional safety tip.

The kids dearly love him, and so do I. No trip to the state fair would be complete without a detour through the Highway Gardens where kids are loyal subjects and Otto is king.

The Silver Lining

I would never want this boy to be sick. I would always wish for him to be as happy and healthy as he looks here at our family reunion last month:

But if sick he must be, I would wish for it to be just barely bad enough to ban him from daycare--because this means that he gets to spend the day with me.

This week, a minor throat infection struck Beenie, and I had the pleasure of his company all day yesterday and the day before. His mild illness may have created a little cloud of intermittent fever and a runny nose, but our time together edged that cloud with a silver lining.

With no time to plan and no particular agenda, we were content to simply let the days unfold on their own and go with the lazy flow of late summer. We ate when we wanted to, played when we wanted to, and napped when we wanted to.

On their own, our two days assumed a kind of animal theme. Here, in ascending order of time spent, are the three activities that kept us the busiest:

Number 3: A Berenstain Bears Book Titled The Spooky Old Tree

When it comes to a simple story and illustrations that truly captivate a three-year-old, Jan and Stan hit the nail on the head with this delightful book. In it, the three Berenstain cubs, equipped with flashlight, stick, and rope, take off on an adventure inside a gnarled, darkly ominous old tree nestled in a wooded area inhabited by bats and vultures.

One by one they lose their possessions to an alligator, a broad axe falling from a suit of armor, and Great Sleeping Bear, who wakes up in a really bad mood when the cubs crawl up over his back as he sleeps. Although Great Sleeping Bear chases them with a large, growly scowl, they are able to hightail it out of the tree and back home to Mama Bear, but not before having the biggest adventure of their little ursine lives.

Beenie was most fascinated by the "suiting armors" lined up in the "spooky old hall" that the little bears dared to investigate behind a secret panel deep inside the spooky old tree. Many questions and comments related to Great Sleeping Bear came in a close second: "Is he mad? What's he doing? What's he saying?" You get the idea.

Number 2: The"Elefun" Game

My most recent (and best) dollar spent at a garage sale went for a game in which a battery-powered fan blows plasticized paper butterflies up through the soft, collapsible plastic trunk of a jolly blue elephant. Once the fan motor is turned on, twenty-something red, yellow, and green butterflies fill the air above and flutter down to be netted by an excited, giggling boy who is supposed to be sick but is not acting like it.

The whole process takes less than thirty seconds, and then it is time to reload and do the whole thing over . . . and over . . . and over. I can't say enough about how much true "Elefun" Beenie and I had with this. In fact, it is so much fun that you don't even mind the reloading.

Number 3: Dinosaur Flash Cards

The same garage sale got me, this time for 50 cents, a like-new deck of thirty-six flash cards with pictures and facts about dinosaurs. Although the cards are recommended for ages five and above, Beenie absolutely loved these. Early in the game, he picked out a dinosaur to represent each member of his family. (I am proud to say that I am the allosaurus.)

Beenie wanted me to go through the deck over and over pronouncing those difficult multi-syllable dinosaur names (Thank you, pronunciation key!). "What's this one called about?" he asked each time he turned up a new card. I'll be honest--tuojiangosaurus and pachycephalosaurus took a little practice--but I venture to say you haven't lived until you have heard a three-year-old say struthiomimus. Many times.

Dorothy and her friends on the Yellow Brick Road may have had their fun in the realm of lions, tigers, and bears.  But--Oh My!--what fun Beenie and I had this week with dinosaurs, elephants, and bears. It may not have been Oz where we were, but for the past two days this old house has been every bit as magical.