Hannah posted a link to this NPR article about cultural omnivores on my wall—she was right, I enjoyed it immensely, especially in the context of our morning, which has included (so far, and for varying clusters of us) a discussion of imagery and symbolism in The Great Gatsby, the viewing of some beautiful hammer dulcimer performances on YouTube, and this:
If you’d seen Huck’s face after he inhaled his morning smoothie, you’d know why!
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The early part of the year was all about bread. And crows.
In the spring we spent a good bit of time in the Middle Ages.
Because my kids are getting older, and their stories are their stories, this year I mostly blogged about books.
And posted pictures of this guy.
Looking back, I see it was a kind of mellow first half of the year, which is nice. The pace grew pretty intense come July, beginning with Comic-Con…
…and almost immediately afterward we were zooming off on our cross-country adventure, me and the kids.
We saw some beautiful sights…
…and got to spend time with so many dear friends-and-relations. (I’m still bummed that I didn’t remember to take any pictures during our super-fun visit with Sandra Dodd in Albuquerque. She made the most wonderful monkey platter for my kids, and we talked and explored and played, and the kids never wanted to leave, and then it started to rain and we dashed for the car because I wanted to get to our next stop before the rain got too bad, and I was backing out of her driveway before I thought of the camera. C’est la vie!)
2010 was a year of literary fangirl dreams coming true, beginning with our visit to Rocky Ridge Farm, home of Laura Ingalls Wilder in Mansfield, Missouri.
(Dear Kim-from-the-gift-shop, if you are reading this—thanks again for the wonderful warmth and hospitality you showed us!)
In October, after enjoying the heck out of myself at KidLitCon, I had that splendid day in Mankato, Minnesota with the amazing Kathy Baxter and my beautiful, beautiful friend Margaret. I’m sure you remember Maggie’s hilarious account of our Betsy-Tacy tour. It was such a great day. (And then I got to spend the night at Margaret’s house and meet her brilliant children, and that was pretty great too.)
Kathy Baxter, me, and the smile that ate my face. Margaret’s photo, shamelessly stolen.
Mrs. Ray’s brass bowl. I about died.
The memorial walk. My feet. Margaret’s photo.
Winona’s wall. Margaret’s photo. My bliss.
Betsy’s porch! My Margaret.
Also in October, the reissues of Carney’s House Party/Winona’s Pony Cart and Emily of Deep Valley came out with the new introductions by Mitali Perkins and me. And that was pretty darn exciting. Not just because I got to write an intro for a book I cherish deeply, but because Carney and Emily came back into print.
To celebrate the event, a wonderful San Diego-area children’s bookstore named Readers Inc. hosted a Deep Valley Book Party, at which I got to share my enthusiasm for all things Betsy-Tacy with a packed house of kids and parents. I read aloud the Everything Pudding episode from Betsy-Tacy and Tib, and we had lots of Q and A and cookies.
My favorite part of that whole event: the fabulous T-shirt made by one of Jane’s good friends, the lovely Miss E. Sanchez, commemorating Betsy’s Crowd and their songs, adventures, and catchphrases.
Awesome.
That was November, and then came this past month’s blur of CYBILs reading, and everyone being sick and getting better, and my parents visiting, and Christmas, and here we are. It was a fast year, a full year, a fine year.
I can’t wait to see what’s coming our way in 2011.
Monday morning. Long line at the post office. I had a stack of packages to mail—same as everyone else there. I also needed to pick up more of the flat-rate priority mail boxes, but the racks were empty. A man ahead of me in line needed some too, and one of the clerks had to go hunt up a new batch of them in the back room. Listening to the impatient sighs all around, I was glad he’d beat me to that request.
Except it turned out—after the guy left, which is a bummer—that the new stack of boxes was the wrong kind, just plain priority mail, not the flat-rate boxes. So that poor customer went home with a pile of the wrong thing. I was the one who discovered the error, while the clerk was taking care of my packages.
“Are these the same as the flat-rate boxes?” I asked, not seeing the words “flat rate” anywhere on the white slabs of ready-to-fold cardboard.
“Oh, shoot,” said the clerk. “No. Shoot. We gave him the wrong kind.”
I had already told him I was going to need a dozen of the medium flat-rate boxes, so he said he’d have to go look for them after he finished ringing up my packages. More restless sighs from the long line of people behind me. Now I was going to get to be that person, the delayer.
The clerk handed me my receipt and disappeared to the back room. Shuffle, sigh, murmur goes the line. Seconds tick painfully by. This is the kind of situation that makes me squirm; I have a tendency to blurt out inanities in a vain effort to break the tension.
“This is the awful part,” I said to the line in general. “When you’re the one holding everybody up.”
Every single person in that line stared back at me blankly. Not one single commiserating smile, not even a quirked corner of the mouth. Just—blank. Except for the one woman who muttered to the man in front of her, “She picked an interesting time for this.”
Which, I couldn’t help it, made me chuckle—an interesting time for what? For picking up shipping boxes? In the post office during the holidays? That’s an interesting time? I think it’s kind of a pedestrian time, an obvious time, don’t you? Or maybe it’s just that I “picked” a time when the line was very long. Which is to say, I went to the post office in December. Hee. I’ve stood in no less than four very long lines at three different branches of the post office in the past week, at various times of day. (Y’all are keeping me busy with these book orders!) I feel fairly confident in saying categorically that there is no time the line isn’t long, this time of year.
It was funny, the contrast between that P.O. trip (mortifying) and the one I made last Saturday morning, with Stevie along for the ride (amusing). We had three packages to mail and I was hoping to pick up the flat-rate boxes then, but then, too, the display rack was empty. And—ironically—I didn’t ask the clerk (different clerk, different P.O.) to fetch me some that day, because the line was moving so very slowly. When Stevie and I got in line, there was a woman finishing up at the counter who had mailed six or seven packages, and I gathered her order had been complicated and had taken a while. The man at the front of the line was clearly at the limits of his patience; he was puffing air out his nose quite angrily, like an irritated bull.
The clerk, a cheerful, portly fellow, seemed to be trying—with much more success than I had a few days later—to lighten the mood with humor. As the six-package lady was packing up her wallet to leave, the clerk announced, “All right, and FIVE..FOUR…THREE…TWO…ONE! We’re closed, people!”
Gasps all round—but immediately he was laughing, waving his hand to show he was teasing us. Everyone giggled except the puffing bull-man, who barked, “You’re lucky we don’t all have pistols!”—which I think was meant to be funny, actually, but came off rather alarming.
Then it was that man’s turn at the counter. As he strode forward, he watched the six-package lady exiting and said, loudly, “Doesn’t she know they teach remedial math in night school?”
I looked anxiously at the door to see if the woman had heard the insult. I think (hope) she was out of earshot by then.
“Harsh,” I murmured, and the woman in line ahead of me, a lovely twinkly-eyed grandmother with fluffy Miss Marple hair, shook her head in agreement.
The bull-man pointed at the angel stamps on the poster and said, “I want 25 of those.” But they only come, the clerk explained, in books of 20. Bull-man snorted, exasperated. “Fine. Then give me 25 of those blueberry ones,” he grumped, pointing at the juniper-berry stamp in the Evergreens collection.
“I’m sorry, sir,” said the clerk. “Those come as a set—the four evergreen designs.”
“But I only want the berries.”
“I’m sorry, sir, they don’t come separately.”
“But I don’t want the pine cones!”
“I’m sorry, sir…”
By now Miss Marple and I were both giggling, hidden from the bull-man’s view by the big empty rack that was supposed to hold my flat-rate boxes. The young guy in front of Miss Marple shot me a grin. There was this ripple of camaraderie all down the line—the bull-man had been so disgusted with the six-package lady for taking so long. He would have hated to be behind his own self in line. It was kind of delicious, this moment.
Now, threaded through the seven or eight minutes it took the man to agree to suffer the pine cones along with the berries, Stevie was chattering to me in his hybrid of English and ASL, and I was speaking-signing back to him, and he was melting the hearts of the other women in line, as he is wont to do. He’s just such a cute little guy, you know? Miss Marple loved him. Ms. Marple, I should say, because she told me all about her granddaughter who is deaf, and she, grandma, signs a little, “but not enough.” And we talked about Signing Time and ways to learn ASL.
And it turned out the young guy in front of her was mildly hard of hearing and had worn hearing aids as a child, but didn’t wear them any longer. He cracked Stevie up, making eyes at him around the empty box rack. It felt like we were all passengers together on a cruise or something, fellow travelers bonding on a long journey.
At last the bull-man stomped out with his despised pine cones, and the next few transactions moved rapidly. Stevie and I were beckoned forward by the same affable clerk who’d been so patient with bull-man and six-package lady. He greeted me heartily and signed hello to Steve. And proceeded to explain, as he weighed my packages, that he too was hard of hearing. (What are the odds? It was kind of incredible, this convergence of hard-of-hearing men young and old.) I learned to sign when I was little, he signed, and Stevie grinned and got shy, and I was kind of relieved the bull-man wasn’t in line anymore because our conversation undeniably added a few extra moments to the transaction.
Good moments. Moments of connection. Everyone in that line was smiling—the bull-man’s ironic surliness had put us all in merry spirits, somehow. That and a cute little deaf kid with blue hearing aids.
I guess that sense of connection, that we’re-all-in-this-together feeling, is what I was looking for on Monday, three days later, when I babbled my remark to the impatient queue in the other post office. I was a six-package lady myself that time and already self-conscious about that when the whole wrong-kind-of-box thing happened.
I should have brought Stevie with me that day. Or a loud and bitter hater of pine cones.
Do I blog backward or forward? Kidlitcon first, or Mankato and Maud? We’ll see what tomorrow brings. Tonight: I’m home, I’m tuckered, I’m beaming. I saw Betsy’s house. Tacy’s house. Tib’s house. Carney’s house! The sleeping porch! Winona’s house, with the stone wall she sat upon. Emily’s slough. Mrs. Ray’s brass bowl. The bench at the top of Hill Street. The Big Hill. Little Syria. The Carnegie Library. Maud’s grave. Cab’s too—the real Cab, Jab Lloyd. It was an extraordinary day because I was in the company of the extraordinary Kathy Baxter, who knows, well, everything about Maud Hart Lovelace and the Betsy-Tacy books, and my dear pal Margaret, who took me home and treated me like a queen. And that was just the Mankato day! Kidlitcon was marvelous. I could write about it for a week. I may have to. But not tonight.
Tonight, I’m home.
I fly to Minneapolis tomorrow. My first time in Minnesota! My first time going anywhere alone, without Scott and/or the kids, since, um, before there were kids, I think?
If you’ll be there, come talk to me. I’m shy about introductions (though never afterward). (Famous Peterson family story: Scott’s sister lived in Somalia when Scott and I first met, so we’d been dating for months before I met her. I’d heard all about her; she’s Scott’s only sister, the oldest of the five Peterson kids—he’s the youngest—and I was excited to meet her but terribly, terribly shy about it. Some family friends were getting married and I knew that’s where I’d be meeting Susan for the first time. Fierce rain that day. Scott dropped me off outside the church and went to park. As I entered the lobby, I saw his mom and sisters-in-law in conversation with a beautiful woman I recognized as Susan from the pictures on his parents’ staircase wall. I walked toward them, mentally rehearsing what to say: Hi, Susan, I’m Lissa. Hi, Susan, I’m Lissa. But as I drew near, Susan greeted me first: “Hi, Lissa!” And I panicked, blurting out: “Hi! I’m Susan!” Because I am so very very poised in all circumstances, oh yes.)
So anyway, if you see me at KidlitCon please don’t wait for me to make the first move. If I fumble and say my name is your name by mistake, you’ll know why.
I think I’ll miss most (or all) of the reception tomorrow night. My flight is supposed to land at 5:40 and the reception starts at six.
I have not flown since the Barcelona trip two years ago (gosh, going on three) and before that I think it had been 1999 when I went to Georgia for my uncle’s funeral. True confession: I actually love airline food and I’m sad that you don’t get it automatically (i.e. for free) anymore. How cool, though, that I can have my boarding pass sent straight to my cellphone.
I hope I remember to pack my charger.
I washed my red coat to take with me. I’ve only worn it once or twice in the four years since we moved here—oh I know, I bet I wore it last December to that terrific singalong at the organ pavilion in Balboa Park. Huh, nope. Just looked at the pictures and it must have been a warmish day. Rose is in short sleeves! So who knows how long my coat has been mustifying in the closet. When I took it out of the washer, I found loot from the pockets, fourteen dollars along with a pair of little black earwarmers my awesome friend Lisa gave me when we lived in Virginia, where the winters are freezy and I was always wincing over my icy ears. They are heartwarmers, too, because when I saw them—for the first time since our last Blue Ridge winter, I imagine—I was hit with such a wave of love for Lisa. Of course that happens pretty much every time I think of her: that’s the sort of person she is.
My parents and niece are coming here for a visit this week—we will practically cross in the air. Well, almost. I bet my house won’t be very picked up when they arrive. They won’t mind.
Do I need to pack an umbrella? I wonder if I can find the pink one I paid a zillion Euros for in Barcelona that day I got caught in the rain.
Not wearing my red coat at the Spreckels Organ Pavilion last December.
Yesterday I blew my hair dry for the first time in, I dunno, twenty years, in an attempt to replicate the salontastic look my beloved stylist gave me after my haircut last week. My own attempt was semi-successful, not as fabulous as Stephanie’s handiwork, but not bad. This was a dry run for KidlitCon on Saturday. Next week I’ll be right back to my regular lazy air-dry.
Later in the day I had to make a Target run, and when I came out it was pouring. San Diego saves all its rain for one afternoon a year, I think. This was that afternoon. As I dashed to the car, I could practically feel the frizz reasserting itself strand by strand. Sproing!
Our neighborhood isn’t build for torrential rain. The gutters were miniature rivers. I braced as I forded a temporary creek on my own street, feeling like Pa Ingalls guiding the horses across. As I turned into our driveway, I saw a baseball go sweeping past in the current. Our baseball? I didn’t think so, but it looked like a perfectly good one and seemed a shame to let it wind up in the storm drain. I pulled into the driveway, threw the car into park and jumped out into the rain. The ball was already floating past my neighbor’s house by the time I caught up with it. I leaped over the raging river of the gutter—and splashed down in the street in water an inch past the hem of my jeans. Shoes, soaked. Socks, sodden. Sleek salon hair? Utterly demolished, replaced by a dripping tangle.
That’ll learn me!
21 days, 16 states, nearly 5800 miles by minivan. We left home on August 4th, the six kids and I, and got back this afternoon. It’ll probably take me another three weeks to tell all the stories. I started posting about the trip while we were still on the road but didn’t want to say we were away from home until we weren’t anymore.
We got to spend time with beloved family on both sides, Scott’s and mine, and had delightful visits with friends all over the country. This was an August we’ll not soon forget.
Tomorrow we’ll tackle the mountain of laundry, but tonight I’m still thinking of the mountains west of Tucson this morning, as we moved out from under a heavy blue storm into the bright desert light.
(Grainy cellphone photo.)
Tonight we are happy to be safely home, reunited with Scott (who flew out to Virginia to join us for a week of our trip, but returned home ten days ago). Kids are bathed and still mostly on Central Time, so bedtime is nigh. Scott says we have three episodes of Mad Men to catch up on. There’s dulce de leche ice cream in the freezer. I loved our grand adventure, but I am happy, happy, happy to be home.
Arizona meteor crater. Thursday, August 5th.
Wednesday, August 4th: ready to roll.
Facebook log:
8/4/10.
Just discovered Rilla has filled her travel backpack with milkweed fluff. “So I can frow it in the air when we get there and chase it.”
Oh he’s cruel! I’m loading the car. He puts “Every Time You Go Away (You Take a Piece of Me With You)” on iTunes. ::::sob::::
Flagstaff AZ smells like pine and stars.
OK, so one teeny tiny little hiccup…I have lost my voice. Don’t know why. Don’t feel sick. Dry air? Faded gradually all day. I didn’t talk much. Luckily we know a lot of sign language but it’s hard to sign while you’re driving.
Today: chaparral to sand dunes to saguaro desert to pine forest. 17 audio chapters of The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane. Older girls assigning one another shifts for answering the little ones’ “Are we there yet?” since I couldn’t do it myself. Strawberry lemonade. Incredible mountain view south of Flagstaff. Wired baby.