It’s been over a month since I posted my plea for help with my search for a long lost, fondly remembered story tape about the King of the Raisins. No one responded, and I had just about given up on ever tracking it down. And then this morning the wonderful Lesley Austin posted this comment:
I think I may know this one as I heard this story once. Could it be Jay O’Callahan? We have another of his stories “Raspberries” and have SO enjoyed everything of his we have come across. I can imagine him saying what you wrote.
Lesley, hoorah for you, you did it! I visited Jay O’Callahan’s website and sure enough, there was a “Raisins” story on one of his CDs. I wrote him a note, and he wrote right back to say his was indeed the story I remember. I am thrilled!
Just this morning, Scott was quoting my favorite line from this story. Scott has never heard the tape; like my kids, he only knows the tale from my patchy reminiscences. But as I wrote last month, the bits I remember are inextricably woven into our family vocabulary. Wonderboy woke up a nasty cold this morning, and his nose is, um, disgusting, to put it bluntly. When Scott walked into the kitchen, the Boy beamed at him through the goop and tottered toward his daddy for a wrestle. Scott scarcely flinched at the affront to his shirt (ew) but I heard him mutter, “Horrible, horrible! But I like you anyway.”
So far, ours has been a spring of swoops and dives. Giant up-swoop: Wonderboy is walking! Really and truly walking, all over the house, sometimes clapping for himself as he goes. He can’t get up onto his feet by himself yet, but if you stand him up he takes off like a little wind-up toy. He is walking for the sheer joy of motion, not as a way of getting somewhere, not as a means to an end, but as an end in itself. It is all about the going (which of course I can’t help seeing as a metaphor for our philosophy of education: it’s about process, not product). I wish I could upload video here; I wish everyone could see this eager boy trucking along, he who had to wait seventeen months for mobility. He is a Wonder-of-wonders-boy.
Little down-swoop: He is a boy who scared his mother silly by having a major nosebleed in the middle of a nap one day last week. I went to get him up and aaaaahhhhh! He was lying there drenched in blood. Now you know that given Jane’s history our first thought, whenever there is unusual bleeding involved with one of our children, is going to be ‘low platelets?’ So of course we had to take him in for a blood test, which I am thrilled to say came back perfectly normal. The nosebleed seems to have been merely a change-of-season dryness thing. Whew.
Then three days later I discovered the Boy had a mouthful of sores. Thrush. Ugh. Enough said. (But he’s doing better now, thanks.)
So that was two unplanned doctor visits in the space of a week. A few days later I found a tick happily dining on my stomach. ::::shudder:::: When we pulled him out, his head remained stuck tight. Ugh ugh ugh. I wound up having to go to the doctor on Saturday morning to have it dug out. Not exactly the way I’d planned to start the day of our (big upswoop coming) 11th anniversary. But you know, it sort of fit the ‘so ridiculous you have to laugh’ motif we’ve got woven through this marriage. As a couple, Scott and I seem to be a magnet for misadventures. Somehow we don’t mind, because we love a good story. And you don’t get good story if the roller coaster stays flat. It’s got to swoop.
