Textual Malfeasance

Romance

In an effort to get straight down to business, I click on the Breaking News link of our local daily newspaper. The breakingest news is at the top of the list, one would assume, and the date of that top item is four days prior to today's date. Among the list of names that act as links to obituaries is one for Obit Correx. One can only hope that Mr. or Ms. Correx lived a long and happy life before being called home by his or her heavenly father to frolic with the angels. And from the 911 files:

It's the classic summertime love story: Boy meets girl. Boy and girl hit it off. Girl comes home with boy and spends the night. Boy wakes up, suspects that he's been drugged and finds his rent money stolen.

Ah, but for the good old days when a boy and girl could meet at a park, get drunk, go back to his place, hook up, and live happily ever after or until his old lady was released on probation.

Yet another reason I'll be in the Mommy section of Hell

Reading a women's magazine while waiting for my new tires to be installed (shouldn't there be at least a car magazine or two to choose from?), I see yet more helpful hints for mothers: What to do with your children's artwork. Back when dirt was still gravel when I went to school, we had Art maybe once a week. Our assignments did not involve hands-on, multimedia interpretations of the concept of electricity or a collage of found objects representing how we felt about Dick and Jane and Spot observing the gender stereotyping of Mother baking a cake while Father mows the lawn. I'm not saying that one method is necessarily better than the other, but I suspect that if teachers had to find a place to store all of the assignments they assigned, there would be a lot more assignments that require no more storage room than that found in an average workbook.

One mother loves to frame and hang her son's art on her office walls. Another clips the art to a string in the family room. Yeah, fine, for nice little paintings of What Winter Means to Me. No one ever tells you what to do with the 3D map of Imaginary Town. Or the diorama of a Plains Indian village in the 19th century, complete with real vegetation and a working campfire. Or the piece crafted from Dixie cups, coffee filters, and yogurt lids of My Family Before the Terrible Fire. Other mothers say that they choose just a few items and save those in a big box stuffed under the bed. Ever try culling a child's oeuvre to just the good stuff? Try explaining that the glittery construction paper and egg carton collage is in the garbage can because it's one of her lesser works.

So far, I've not seen my solution: burn it while the kids are at school. Trust me: the kids are 23 and 19 now, and not once have they asked where a particular art project is. And if I told them that they had to keep the box of their school memories in their own homes, you can bet they'd be burning the boxes themselves.

Fruity communications

At a nursing home I am visiting a friend. She is 82 and sharp; just having a little problem with the effects of osteoporosis and will be out of there in a few weeks. My cell phone, tiny, sleek, all brushed stainless steel, is sitting on the bench next to me and she says, "Is that one of those Blueberry things?" Ha ha! and she laughs as I say, "You mean a Blackberry?" "Yeah, something like that." I find it amusing that this lovely 82-year-old woman knows enough about the world of electronics, a world in which she participates very little, to know that there is a device called a Something-berry. Then I remember: not so long ago, my husband, 31 years her junior, said, "He has one of those Blueberry things."