In which I offend purple-wearing old folks. . .

When I Am Old I Will Wear Clothes Appropriate for My Age!

When I am an old woman,
I shall clothes wear clothes appropriate for my age - -
With or without a hat as long as it goes,
and looks good on me.
And I shall spend my money
on books and movies
(and maybe a trip to Ireland)
and probably more and more skin care products,
because, DANG, it was easier to be holier-than-thou when I was 20 and wrinkle-free.
I shall sit where ever I can find a comfortable seat when I'm tired
and Lord help me, if I am gobbling up samples in shops
without regard to my health
and thinking I can still be as active as a young person,
while forgetting what it was like to be young and stupid.
I won't mind wearing my slippers in the rain but hope that
I only pick flowers in other people's gardens if I have permission
and NEVER learn to spit!
I don't want to wear terrible shirts and grow more fat
and eat a pan of brownies all by myself,
or only bread and butter for a week,
and collect coat hangers
and sugar packets and Styrofoam popcorn.
I have responsibilities now like raising my kids,
and paying my bills,
and not driving while talking on my cell phone,
and setting a good example for the children.
But I enjoy having dinner with friends and talking about things.
And I don't want to be a different kind of person
So that people who knew me are shocked and surprised
when suddenly I am old, and stop acting like myself!

Every Earth

Cyn Kitchen is a finalist in a writing contest!

I've been reading Cyn's blog for over two years. I twice nominated her posts for The Perfect Post award. There is a visceral element to her writing. Whether she is telling the story of her stint as a coffee shop owner or a mother's night out with the MAPS (Mothers Against Preschoolers) or about the impact of a life, she writes with such oomph that I can almost hear that exhalation of breath that comes with a strong effort. Laughing or crying, I am always moved.

Her story that made the finals in the storySouth Million Writers Award is called "Every Earth is Fit for Burial." I encourage you to read the story of her story at her blog, The Cynical Kitchen... and then go vote for her story!

NaBloPoMo: It is Finish-ed!!!!

Cue the heavenly choir. I made it. It wasn't always very pretty, but I did it. I have been beating myself up a little bit about the quality of my NaBloPoMo posts this year as opposed to two years ago. I just went, though, and glanced through all of that year's posts and they weren't as spectacular as I remembered. I think the main difference between that year and this is that I did take time on a few posts to do some creative writing. I did a Writer's Digest prompt and a couple of weeks of Word Beads. I was not up for creative writing this year. Shoot, with the migraine invasion, I barely made it through the month.

I am glad I did it though. I found a few new blogs--that is always fun. It was thirty days of discipline--always a challenge for me. And now I get to put up my "I did it!" badge. That is kind of cool.

I am going to leave you with one of my works of creative writing art from two years ago. I had forgotten all about this one. It was a prompt from Writer's Digest in which you were to write a 20-line poem (rhyming or nonrhyming, your choice) about your favorite possession that cost you fewer than $10. I cheated and wrote 24, but it was fun to write and fun to go back and read. I hope you enjoy it!

Paperback Writer

As I sit here and ponder just what to write,
my deadline is coming right at midnight.
So in quest of a prompt--no, I do not jest--
I head on over to the Writer’s Digest.

And there it is, my prompt for the day:
for under 10 bucks, my favorite possession to say.
It doesn’t take too much of a look
to know that my fave is the paperback book.

Might it be a Burke book by Vachss?
A book which spurs me on to fax
my local state senator to say,
"Make those pedophiles go away."

Or that man of the horses, Francis, Dick?
There are so many that the titles can’t stick
in my brain along with the plots.
But I love those horsey books lots and lots.

A paperback book, the size is just right
to take with me everywhere, day or night.
On a restless day I have only to begin
to read over again one of my dear friends.

Paperback books there are so many!
How do I, among them, a favorite choose?
For one of them to win means
all the others must lose.

30 down, 0 to go

I did it!

A LUE Writing Contest

What:  Take the words at the bottom of this post and write a story of interest to a third grade girl.  She is an English Language Learner and does not have a  lot of cultural background references.  

Why: This semester I have worked with one particular third grade girl in my assessment class.  She has patiently endured reading inventories, interest inventories, spelling assessments, auditory and visual discrimination tests AND tutoring in word study/phonics, fluency, vocabulary, comprehension strategies, etc.

Because my student is an English Language Learner, I have spent a lot of my time working with her on vocabulary.  Vocabulary is important for any student, but especially important for someone learning a new language.  Each week, I picked three or four words, created flash cards with visual aids (my silly drawings) and had her work on both word recognition and meaning.  As we near the end of our time together (two more sessions), all the assessments and tutoring are finished.

My professor was just saying that if you can only do one thing for a student, teach them a word. Vocabulary knowledge is a key that unlocks so many doors in learning.  I would love for my student to retain the words she had learned with me.  I also would love for her to have something special to take with her.

Why Not Me?  Um... I can ramble in a blog and write a poem every decade or so.  Creative writing, however, is not my strong suit.  I read so many wonderful writers, I thought someone out in the blog'verse could come up with something way more engaging than anything I could ever write.

Who?  Anyone who reads this and is interested.

How? Take the words that I will list at the bottom of this post and write the best story you can that appeals to a third grade girl.  Keep the concepts fairly simple and references to pop culture a minimum.  She isn't very familiar with those types of references.  Send your entry to me at marylue42 at csu dot fullerton dot edu.

When:  Submit to me on Monday, December 1, 2008 by midnight.

On picking a winner:  I will judge the entries based on creativity and appropriateness.  If I have more than one contender, I will ask a few friends to help me choose.

What does the winner get?  In addition to the good feeling of creating something special for an eight year old girl, the prize of this contest will be a $20 gift certificate to Amazon.com to be delivered by email.  With the winner's permission, I will also post the story to Life, the Universe and Everything.

So, what do you think?  Does this sound interesting to anyone?  If it doesn't sound interesting to you, maybe you know someone who would like to try.  Pass the word.  I think my student will love this and remember it for a very long time.

If you have any questions, give me a holler, here in the comments or by email.

Here are the words.  There are 27 of them if you include peek, wave, and pull and their 'ed' versions.  The words were chosen because they were in stories we read or they met certain needs.  Some taught inflections, affixes, prefixes.  Some taught phonics rules OR exceptions. Some were chosen because they were multisyllabic.  Most of them were also on a national third grade vocabulary list.

Direction

Imagine

Measurement

Peek and Peeked

Pull and Pulled

Wave and Waved

Brought

Thought

Rough

Though

Appear

Disapper

Underneath

Slippery

Thermometer

Emergency

Continue

Escape

Discouraged

Gather

Idea

Route

Strawberry

Electricity

Good luck!

19 down, 11 to go

What Mary-LUE Found There

Mary-LUE logged into the blog’verse and found the others there.

“It’s all right,” she repeated, “I’ve come back.”

“What on earth are you talking about, Mary-LUE? asked atypical.

“Why,” said Mary-LUE in amazement, “haven’t you all been wondering where I was?”

“So you’ve been hiding, have you?” said the Ravin’ Picture Maven.

“Poor old LUE, hiding and nobody noticed! You’ll have to hide longer than that if you want people to start looking for you.”

“But I’ve been away for days,” said Mary-LUE.

The others all stared at one another.

“Batty!” said Beck, tapping her head. “Quite batty.”

“What do you mean, LUE?” asked chickenone.

“What I said,” answered Mary-LUE. “It was just after breakfast when I logged off and I’ve been away for days, and had Starbucks, and all sorts of things happened.”

“Don’t be silly, Mary-LUE,” said blackdaisies. “We’ve all been here and you just left a moment ago and now you’re back. And what is this Starbucks, anyway?”

“She’s not being silly at all,” said MarillaAnne, “she’s just making up a story for fun, aren’t you, LUE? And why shouldn’t she?”

“No, MarillaAnne, I’m not,” she said. “It’s—it’s a magic world. There are people there and weather, and I went on a long drive through the Grapevine and saw Jewel-y in a city called Mo-Des-Tow. I stayed at an Inn called Fairfield but there was no blog’verse connection there. This magic world is called Inreallife.”

“Why, you goose,” said Terri B, “there’s no such place as Inreallife; look! You must have had a power surge.”

Then everyone looked at Mary-LUE’s stats; and they all saw—Mary-LUE herself saw—it had only been a few moments since she’d logged off and then returned. There was no Starbucks and no weather, no Grapevine or city called Mo-Des-Tow, only the blog’verse. “A jolly good hoax, LUE,” Lamont said, “you have really taken us in, I must admit. We half-believed you.”

“But it wasn’t a hoax at all,” said Mary-LUE, “really and truly. I went to Inreallife. Honestly I did. I promise.”

“Come, LUE,” said Alpha DogMa, “that’s going a bit far. You’ve had your joke. Hadn’t you better drop it now?”

Mary-LUE grew very red in the face and tried to say something, though she hardly knew what she was trying to say, and burst into tears.

For the next few days she was very miserable. She could have made it up with the others quite easily at any moment if she could have brought herself to say that the whole thing was only a story made up for fun. But Mary-LUE was a very truthful girl and she knew that she was really in the right; and she could not bring herself to say this.

Leaving: A Perfect Post

It has been awhile since I awarded a Perfect Post award. It isn't because there hasn't been any worthy posts to come my way. I've just been doing other things. This month, though, I was thrilled to see a certain blog pop up in my Google reader with a new post. It had been months and months since Cyn Kitchen had graced the blogosphere with a post, and after a brief post explaining her absence, she came back with a power-packed piece describing her son's leaving for the military.

If you are a parent, these words will suck you right in:

Did nobody warn me? Or was I not listening? One day my oldest son was here, driving me nuts, making me laugh, giving me bear hugs, and the next day he was gone.

If you aren't a parent, you will still be struck by this woman's writing. So, get yourself on over to Cyn's Kitchen and be amazed. And while you are there, do check out her archives, especially What They Really Meant to Say Was..., about the angst of getting published, It Could Be Worse, which anyone who has ever been a preschooler's mom must read, and her hysterical description of life as a coffee shop owner, How I Got This Way.

Creativity

My mind's arms
flail about in search of a tool to
pry open Creativity's Caponian vault.

Laid open the vault contains only
inexact sentence fragments too coarse to hold
aloft, to be deemed worthy of admiration.

No, my Creativity lies wasted like
diseased, arthritic bones with their
marrow sucked dry.

But Creativity never really dies, instead
arthritic, marrow-dry coarseness waits
to be healed, watered, refined,
reborn.

This week's psuedo-angst filled poem inspired by the words:

Flail
Pry
Inexact
Aloft
Disease

Words courtesy of. . .

Word Beads is a weekly writing meme. The challenge is to string the week's five chosen "words below with other words of your choosing to fashion a sentence, several sentences, a paragraph, several paragraphs, a poem, or even a short story." The word sets are generated automatically by a Perl script which draws words at random from a list of approximately 9,000 English words.

Kindergarten

She walked into the classroom, son’s hand in hers, and looked at all the desks, searching for his name. Colorful and inviting, the walls were decorated and the room ready for its new students. Today was the kindergarten tea, a time for her son, along with his classmates, to see his classroom and to meet his teacher so that he would be more comfortable for his first day of class. She didn’t anticipate any trouble. He had attended preschool on that campus for three years and she worked at the church office just across the parking lot. He was in comfortable and familiar territory.

As she showed her son all the room had to offer, a wave of emotion swept over her. Afraid she would start crying, she made excuses to leave early. Hurrying out, she took some deep breaths and the emotion subsided. What was that? she asked herself. She was confused by the strength of feeling and unable to identify the specific emotion. She knew some mothers became emotional as their children started school but surely this was too strong a feeling to be that. Besides, she told herself, he had been in preschool for so long and would just be across the parking lot from her. She hadn’t thought this would bother her.

Pushing the thoughts and emotions aside, she went about her business the next couple of days. The first days of kindergarten were uneventful. Her son was fine. She was able to suppress any overwhelming feelings yet was never completely at ease. Friday came, and with it, the first school chapel. This was the only day the children had a specific dress code: shirts with collars and pants for the boys, skirts or dresses for the girls. No shorts allowed. The no shorts rule presented her with her first power struggle of elementary school. He only liked jeans or shorts and t-shirts. No collars on his shirts and no fat pants--his name for anything other than the hand-me-down Wrangler jeans he favored.

“It’s the rules. You have to wear this.” she stated patiently.

“No! I want shorts!” he demanded.

“You can’t wear shorts. It says in the student handbook. No shorts. I read it. You have to respect the rules even if you don’t agree with them.” she attempted to reason with him. Eventually, she won the battle but not without losing her patience and it was exhausting. At the chapel hour, she headed over to the auditorium to sneak a peek at her little boy. The students filed in, class by class. She noticed one student, then another and another in shorts.

"Wait a minute. What is going on here?" she thought. Spotting Karen, the school vice principal and a good friend, she made her way over to her.

“Karen, so many boys are wearing shorts. The handbook said no shorts.”

“No, dress shorts are allowed.” Karen answered matter-of-factly.

“I read through it more than once. I’m sure it said no shorts at all. I would have let him wear shorts. He wanted to wear shorts,” she began to get distressed.

“No. It says dress shorts are acceptable.” her friend reassured her.

She did not believe this and wouldn’t accept it until the manual was brought out. There in black and white were the words she had missed for some reason.

“For boys, acceptable dress includes collared shirts including knit polo shirts tucked in, pants, dress shorts, belt, sneakers...”

The dam burst of tears was released. All that fighting and struggle for nothing. Her friend tried to console her but she wasn’t in a place to be comforted. The emotion that began the day of the kindergarten tea was released now like a tidal wave and it had to run its course. She made her way back to her office sobbing. She would get the tears under control until someone would walk by and ask her what was wrong.

“I made him wear pants! I’m a horrible mom!” she wailed. The men in her office, while sympathetic, did not quite understand this response. They humored her and gave her hugs, reassuring her that she was a wonderful mom. Although the shorts issue didn’t make sense to them, they were dads and knew not to reason with a mom in this state. After she calmed down, she decided to try to at least alleviate her mistake. Rushing home, she picked up some suitable shorts and took them to his class. After asking permission from his teacher to help him change, she took her son into the class bathroom. As she helped him, she apologized tearfully.

“I’m so sorry, honey. I read the handbook wrong and you are able to wear nice shorts.” He was happy to have shorts but otherwise seemed none the worse for wear. Obviously this was an experience that scarred only the mother and not the son.

Over the next few days, with a little distance, she began to recognize the emotion she had been feeling: grief. That first shocking emotion that day in class was grief. She realized it now. It was the same feeling she experienced at the death of her grandfather, her brother, her grandmother. It didn’t make sense to her, though. Nobody had died. Her son had just started school.

Eventually she realized it wasn’t about being overprotective or nervous about her son’s readiness for school...

It wasn’t about being a horrible mother...

It wasn’t about shorts...

It was about what his beginning kindergarten represented: the death of his unencumbered life and his entering into a world of expectation and responsibility. He was no longer a child free of the world. Her baby was hers alone no longer. He was part of the world now.

He was ready. She was not.




Izzy over at Izzy Mom recently talked about her daughter's first day of kindergarten. This post, combined with Colin's starting high school in a few weeks, got me started remembering my son's first days of kindergarten and my less than composed response to it some nine years ago. It should be noted that when Marley started kindergarten last year, it was a little emotional for me, but I still practically skipped all the way to the car!