Mixed Moss

Textbook of a Tortured Mind

Today I found an old workbook of mine, which I hadn't looked at in a while. The insane scribblings contained therein had something of a The Fall of the House of Usher vibe, so needless to say I was pouring over it in grim fascination when Mom found me.

Mom: (peering over my shoulder) Is that poetry I see in your geometry book, Allie?

Me: No, it's an opening sentence for a story. Looks like I was going through an Edgar Allan Poe phase. (reading aloud) "I know nothing except the near-heaven of the past, the probable hell of the future, and the stifling purgatory of the present, from which I write this narrative."

Mom: Wow, that does sound like you during geometry.

Me: Oh, and look, (pointing down the page) it's a drawing of a bunny. Clearly I was shifting wildly on the emotional scale.

We're Still Not Over Christmas

Mary: (reading Neil a ghost story from The Blue Fairy Book) Then a man entered, of more than ordinary size and of a very fearful appearance, but he was old and had a white beard.

Neil: (interrupting) Santa Claus?

Ah, Sisterly Love...

This is not to be missed.
(Thanks for the reference, Theresa/Peggy!)

More Treasure

My mom once wrote a post on her blog about how it's imporant to say "Yes" sometimes and play with the younger set.

Last night, I was putting little Catherine to bed when she said, "Agnes, can you play with me?"

Oh, no, I thought. Now she's going to cry when I leave. But I tried to explain it to her gently. "Catherine, Mommy said I had to make sure you stayed in bed. I can't play right now."

"No," she said. "I mean tomorrow."

With a start, I realized what she meant. In the morning, she is constantly tugging on me to get off the computer, stop playing piano, stop scribbling journal entries. I want to get everything done before we head off to the cottage, and sometimes I tend to forget about the little blonde-haired cherub that wants so firmly to involve me in her innocent games of "Train Station" and "House."

"Alright," I said. "I'll play with you tomorrow."

Catherine went to sleep with a smile on her face.

True to my word, I was up early the next day. Catherine was waiting for me. We settled down happily into a game of "Train Station," with Catherine making sure that all of the toys came along, that everyone got strapped in and that the couch (I mean the train) got safely to its destination. Marie joined us and we explained to her what was going on.

"Where are we going?" Marie asked, her smiling seven-year-old eyes betraying that she was as eager to play as any of us.

"To the toy store!" Catherine shouted, grabbing the steering wheel. (None of us knows much about train mechanics.)

"We ought to have plenty of props for that scene," Marie whispered.

Later on, Patrick joined in our escapades. While we were headed down the stairs, Catherine announced that she had seen "a chipmunk". Sure enough, when we got to the door and pressed our noses to the glass, we saw a grey squirrel tumbling about near the rhodedendrons, burying nuts (or doing something equally squirrelish).

"That's a squirrel," said Patrick.

"No, it's a chipmunk," Catherine insisted.

"Squirrel!"
"Chipmunk!"
"Squirrel!"
"Chipmunk!"
"Squirrel!"

Just when I was about to break up the fight, Catherine said, "Well, I thought it was a chipmunk, but it's a squirrel."

"It's a CHIPMUNK!" squealed Patrick.

I had to restrain myself from laughing outright, remembering the scene in an old "Bugs Bunny" cartoon that Theresa and I watched when we were little where Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck are arguing over whether it's rabbit season or duck season. Bugs Bunny slyly says, "Rabbit season," and Daffy Duck shouts, "Duck season!" At which point, of course, the hunters start chasing him. Catherine may not have realized it, but she had turned the tables on Patrick just as cleverly.

Oh, how I love them.

One Solitary Life

I haven't posted in a while. I would like to say that it is because I had nothing to post about. The fact is that I actually have.

I am in the Christmas pageant up at my church for the third time. Last year, I played the Blessed Mother. This year, I am a narrator again. I don't mind being narrator. It gives me a chance to stand on the podium and watch everything happening around me. I am working with another narrator, and we have been getting along very nicely. (She is a good friend of mine at this parish.)

I discovered this year that a lot depends on talking slowly. Mom worked with me a lot on that, and I can thank her for it.

At any rate, the reason I wrote this post was to share with you a beautiful piece that the other narrator has to read at the beginning. It is a beautiful meditation for Lent as well as Advent. The version we are using in the play has simpler wording than this one, but I liked the original better.

Here is a man who was born in an obscure village, the child of a peasant woman. He grew up in another village. He worked in a carpenter shop until He was thirty. Then for three years He was an itinerant preacher. He never owned a home. He never wrote a book. He never held an office. He never had a family. He never went to college. He never put His foot inside a big city. He never traveled two hundred miles from the place He was born. He never did one of the things that usually accompany greatness. He had no credentials but Himself...

While still a young man, the tide of popular opinion turned against him. His friends ran away. One of them denied Him. He was turned over to His enemies. He went through the mockery of a trial. He was nailed upon a cross between two thieves. While He was dying His executioners gambled for the only piece of property He had on earth – His coat. When He was dead, He was laid in a borrowed grave through the pity of a friend.

Nineteen long centuries have come and gone, and today He is a centerpiece of the human race and leader of the column of progress.

I am far within the mark when I say that all the armies that ever marched, all the navies that were ever built; all the parliaments that ever sat and all the kings that ever reigned, put together, have not affected the life of man upon this earth as powerfully as has that one solitary life.

---Dr. James Allan Francis

******
On another note, here is a picture that I took at pageant practice before the director arrived. As you can see, it is a tad chaotic.

I think the Halloween spirit hasn't worn off

Patrick: (pointing out the car window at a man in a yellow raincoat) Look at that man in the lemon costume!

Funny Quotes

Marie: (putting a revolting mess made out of "Tang" drink powder and water in the freezer) Ah, the joys and triumphs of being me!

Catherine: I'm Katy No-Pocket, and this (pointing to toy kangaroo) is "Katy Yes-Pocket."

Funny Quotes (Midsummer Night's Dream Edition)

Theresa: (reading script aloud) "Good night, sweet friend, thy love ne'er alter till thy sweet life end..."
Theresa and Mom: (singing) "This is the suite life..."*

"I'll put a girdle round about the ________ in forty minutes!"
(Popular examples include: backyard, gardens, cottage.)

Frostfur and I write funny scripts on her blog sometimes. In this one that I wrote, Puck (he's a ferret--Frostfur's idea!) tries to get a job with Operacat:

Puck: (telling Operacat his life history) And sometimes lurk I in a gossip's bowl in very likeness of a roasted crab--and when she drinks, against her lips I bob, and on her withered dewlap pour the ale...
Operacat: (sighing) Robin**, don't go all Shakespere on me! I'm called "Operacat", not "Playcat"!
Puck: (proudly) Well, I am that merry wanderer of the night! I jest to Oberon and...
Operacat: Oh, PLEASE don't start that whole thing over again! Just tell me in Clannish...
Puck: (sigh) Alright, I turn myself into an apple and attack some lady while she's drinking her punch.
Operacat: (clapping her paws) HAHA! The ultimate prank!
Puck: Well, it sounds really boring when I say it like that, but if you say so...
Operacat: Right. What else can you do? Speak in rhyme again and you're automatically fired.
Puck: Whatever...then I turn myself into a stool and slip under some other lady when she sits on me, and then she yells "tailor!"...***
Operacat: Why?
Puck: (careless) Who knows...I scare the ladies in the village, steal people's boots, make drinks go flat, and lead people off-course if they're walking around at night...****
Operacat: (reading a scroll) Yes, it seems that you have a very good resume. (The phone rings) Oops, gotta go, that's a conference call from Nancy Blackett, don't call me, I'll call you. (She kicks him out of her den.)
Puck: *sigh* I miss being that merry wanderer of the night.

*Theme song to a Disney Channel show called The Suite Life of Zack and Cody.

**Puck's real name is Robin Goodfellow.

***Puck's actual lines in A Midsummer Night's Dream are "The wisest aunt, telling the saddest tale/Sometime for three-foot stool mistaketh me/Then slip I from her bum, down topples she/And 'tailor!' cries, and falls into a cough."

****Taken from the fairy's lines:

...are not you he
That frights the maidens of the villagery;
Skim milk, and sometimes labour in the quern
And bootless make the breathless housewife churn;
And sometime make the drink to bear no barm;
Mislead night-wanderers, laughing at their harm?

Piano Trouble and How it Ended

I am currently in Suzuki Piano, Book Two, trying to simaltaniously learn a very difficult two-part piece by Beethoven and have all the pieces in a (very easy) Christmas piano book polished up and ready for Advent. With all of this practicing to do, you can imagine my annoyance when, suddenly, the piano started hissing and rattling softly at me every time I played it. But problems only exist to be conquered. This one called for detective work.

The first thing to be done (after I had told everyone in the house) was to take all of the objects on the piano, one by one, and put them on the dining room table.
First, the bust of Beethoven. I took it off and pounded on the keys. The piano kept buzzing, like some sort of angry hornet. Then the mantis cage, with Slow Dance the mantis inside. Still no luck. Then the many music books that we've accumulated over the years, which should have been inside the piano bench but were on the top of the piano for easier access. Still nothing happened. Or rather, nothing stopped happening.

Finally I thought that I was onto it. It must be the music stand. I moved it onto the dining room table, which by now was covered with every concievable bit of clutter that one might have on top of a piano. Then I played. I heard the rattling again. It was as if whatever was making the sound was laughing to see all of my efforts in vain.

At this point, I did something that I do very rarely. I opened the lid of the piano to see if something had fallen in. Opening a piano always reminds me of two things:

1. The scene in Stuart Little (the book, not the movie) in which Stuart goes into a piano and fixes the stuck key by pushing it upwards.
2. A Tom and Jerry cartoon where Tom is playing piano and Jerry is inside the piano, running around and ducking the moving keys.

But it was impossible to tell if there was anything, mice or otherwise, inside. I even got Theresa to help me, but it soon became obvious that, if the offending object was indeed imbedded in the piano itself, it would have slid downwards and lost itself entirely.

The next day, having given up on ever finding whatever was causing the sound, I found out something by mistake. If you opened the lid of the piano, there was another little panel, which could be opened so you could look beneath the surface of the keys. I did a careful inspection, and the realized what the problem was.

Three mini wiggle-eyes. They were on top of the lower part of the piano keys, and when I was playing the piano they would bounce up and down and rattle.

My mom says that wiggle eyes were what drove Beethoven to madness.

I have no doubt.

Latin Lovers

My sister Margaret, ever the Latin scholar: Let's conjugate 'stupid! 'Stupo, stupas, stupat, stupamus, stupatis, stupant.'

(later)
Mom: Margaret, time for your Latin recitation.
Margaret: But, Mommy, I alreadly did my Latin! I conjugated "Stupid!"
Mommy: Don't you mean "you conjugated stupidly?"