The first place that I can well remember was a large pleasant meadow with a pond of clear water in it. Some shady trees leaned overit, and rushes and water-lilies grew at the deep end. Over the hedge on one sie, we looked into a ploughed field, and on the other we looked over a gate at our master’s house, which stood bye the roadside; at the top of the meadow was a plantation of fir tres, and at the bottom a running brook overhung by a steep bank. –Anna Sewell, Black Beauty

Little girls and horses seem to be one of life’s inevitable combinations, like peanut butter and jelly, salt and pepper, or cream and sugar. I was no different.

My first horse books were the Marguerite Henry series about Misty and Phantom and the rest of the Chincoteague ponies. I loved those books, and could taste the salt air and feel the damp sand while I read them, but Black Beauty was a far more satisfying story.

Written from the horse’s POV, it’s essentially the autobiography of a thoroughbred, and while there is abuse and neglect enough to wring tears from any small girl, there is also a gently told tale with a happy ending.

Black Beauty remained my favorite horse book until I started reading Dick Francis mysteries when I was fifteen. Last Christmas, I sent a copy to my niece. I hope she loves it as much as I do.

“The time has come,” the Walrus said,
“To talk of many things:
Of shoes – and ships – and sealing wax –
Of cabbages – and kings –
And why the sea is boiling hot –
And whether pigs have wings.”
– Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass

I was fascinated with full-length mirrors before I ever encountered the Alice books, but once I had, I would spend long moments gazing into reflective surfaces wishing there really were magical lands on the other side. My first introduction to Alice was, again, not through Disney, though I did have the book and record set in a collection of such albums that my grandfather gifted me with when I was quite small, but through the poem “Jabberwocky,” with it’s twisting rhyme and nonsense words that seem so real.

At first it was just a story, and I read it, and put it away. I encountered it again soon after I turned twelve. Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan had just come out on video, and I was crushing on Chekov (just…don’t even go there), and of course I read the novelization, where it was mentioned that David had invented a video game called Boojum Hunt, with two of the other scientists, based on the poem, “The Hunting of the Snark.”

I went looking for the poem, and found Alice instead, this time, an annotated version that explained the puns and social commentary – and I was hooked. Satire, puns, logic puzzles, Carroll really knew how to engage the whole brain, and Alice was no wuss, but a girl who figured out what she needed to do, and did it, and while she didn’t really like getting her hands dirty, she wasn’t afraid to try ANYTHING.

There are worse role models.

But I still like the Snark poem better.

And, because I’m that much of a geek, here’s the relevant passage from the novelization of STII:TWOK:

“Come, listen, my men, while I tell you again
The five unmistakable marks
By which you may know, wheresoever you go,
The warranted genuine Snarks.

“Let us take them in order. The first is the taste,
Which is meager and hollow, but crisp:
Like a coat that is rather too tight in the waist,
With a flavor of Will-o-the-wisp.

“Its habit of getting up late you’ll agree
That it carries too far, when I say
That it frequently breakfasts at five-o’clock tea,
And dines on the following day.

“The third is its slowness in taking a jest.
Should you happen to venture on one,
It will sigh like a thing that is deeply distressed:
And it always looks grave at a pun.

“The fourth is its fondness for bathing-machines,
Which is constantly carries about,
And believes that they add to the beauty of scenes–
A sentiment open to doubt.

“The fifth is ambition. It next will be right
To describe each particular batch:
Distinguishing those that have feathers, and bite,
And those that have whiskers, and scratch.

“For, although common Snarks do no manner of harm,
Yet, I feel it my duty to say,
Some are Boojums–”

My last audio post, for those who haven’t listened, was about Jane Eyre. I logged into my desktop computer and started Trillian a few minutes ago, and was instantly greeted by Rana, who IM’d me with the kind of textual tone only former history professors can have when dealing with former English majors:

R: Jane. Fricking. Eyre? Miss Meliss, Miss Meliss, Miss Meliss.
R: Fell in love?
R: She fell in love with a guy who kept his first wife in the ATTIC!
R: And then he got his sight BACK!
R: I threw that book across the room.
R: Now Wuthering Heights
R: That was a book!

Me: I was ELEVEN.
Me: When you’re ELEVEN, Jane Eyre is romantic. But then, you’re talking to someone who write romantic Snape FanFic.

R: Yeah, I try not to think about that.
R: And I was about eleven too and I thought it was tripe.
R: And having been to menudo cook offs I know about tripe.

I’m thinkin’ I probably shouldn’t tell her I actually liked Canterbury Tales, too.

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We’re all still sitting at dinner, and there is storytelling going on all around me. It’s the kind of easy storytelling among people who’ve known each other for a long time, similar to the kind grownups tell and kids eavesdrop on.

To me, it’s reminiscent of the scenes in the various Little House books where Laura and Mary are in bed in the wagon, or in their room, listening to Ma and Pa talk into the night. Especially this reminds me of all the scenes in Little House in the Big Woods when there were cousins filling the house, and people were crammed in, but still having fun.

I remember similar evenings at my grandmother’s house, with the mix of New Jersey Neapolitan and just New Jersey accents, and the softer tones of my aunt and my mother, talking laughing, and then, shocked silences at odd moments when lulls in conversation bring out the embarrassing whispers that kids aren’t supposed to hear.

I miss those summer nights. I’ve been able to experience similar moments with Fuzzy’s family, but the accents are wrong, and the stories aren’t mine.

I ate less than half of my chicken tetrazzini tonight, and I’m already stuffed. If I were Winnie the Pooh (see, I said I’d come back to him) I’d so be stuck in that door in Rabbit’s house.

Winnie the Pooh…is there any story more representative of childhood innocence than that of Christopher Robin and his honey-addicted bear of very little brain? I think not.

I’ve been reading Milne (or having his work read to me) as long as I can remember, but if Alcott was an author I shared with my mother, Milne is the author I consider to ‘belong’ to my aunt. I remember being five-and-three-quarters years old and knowing that my Aunt Patti would send me Now We Are Six for my sixth birthday. The book wasn’t at all a surprise, no book was really, because Patti is The Book Aunt (every family has one), but the personal note she always wrote in her loopy blue handwriting always was.

To this day we exchange Pooh-themed cards on major holidays.
It’s not sappy; it’s tradition.

One of the really popular books when I was in grade school was Soup and Me by Robert Newton Peck. It was more than a novel about kids, but a slice of Americana, less smarmy than the version of small-town America than that portrayed by the Andy Griffith show, but still relatively wholesome.

I mention this novel because we’re sitting in Spaghetti Warehouse in Dallas’s West End, and Fuzzy, for once did NOT order soup in high summer, though someone else in our group did, and I was desperate for a tie-in, so it’s a stretch, but I already used Harriet the Spy and I can’t think of any books that involve pasta, except…didn’t Shel Silverstein’s Where the Sidewalk Ends have some poem about a meatball?

I’m sitting in the mostly empty CSz arena half-listening to the post-show notes, and thinking about how I nearly obliterated my Algebra II grade because I spent most of the classes either wanting to strangle a certain classmate for clicking his pen CONSTANTLY or passing notes back and forth with one of my sponsors, who shall remain nameless to protect the inno – well, because it’s polite.

Surprisingly, note passing has inspired me to write about Meg “The Princess Diaries” Cabot’s first not-just-for-young-adults novels, about two people who meet, and form a relationship based solely on email. (As I met my husband on a MUSH, I have some experience with meeting people online), but the novel was entirely in email. Sometime before that, I also read a book about a mother and daughter who communicate almost entirely via post-it notes.

While there are times that my husband and I seem to communicate only in text messages and IM, I don’t recommend this as a normal course of action. There’s something to be said for sitting down and talking face to face…even when he claims I don’t listen to him.

The red team is on stage now, playing a game called Stickerdoodles, in which each player is labelled with an endowment (fear of mermaids is one of them) and while this is funny, it’s reminding me of another kind of label, and a story that absolutely not funny.

It was in sixth grade, in Arvada, CO, when I read The Diary of Anne Frank for the first time, and as such it was my first encounter with that part of history. We weren’t given the actual book, but an abbreviated script from the Weekly Reader because Melissa Gilbert had just been cast in the title role.

But an abbreviated script wasn’t enough, so I had to read the actual diary, and I was instantly entranced, following the tale of this remarkable girl who perservered through so much. The movies don’t really show how far Anne and Peter’s relationship really developed, or the depth of her character, the strength of her spirit, or her intelligence.

It’s not a novel for bedtime reading, but it’s definitely something that should be required reading for all children everywhere.

Five Things is a CSz signature game, and it’s almost always used to end the first half of the show. Right now, R, the ref, is asking for suggestions of mundane activities, sports, and high energy activites, in which certain key items will be replaced by items that have nothing to do with the actual activity (example, if the activity was mountain climbing, the mountain would be a marshmallow, the pitons would be fondue forks, and the rope would be spaghetti), a player who was sent out of the room has to guess the Five Things based on clues given using only mime and gibberish.

Communication is key, of course, but what if you can’t? This was a key element of the novel “The Trumpet of the Swan” which was about a young trumpeter swan who couldn’t. A boy adopts him, teaches him to use his feet to write on a slate, and eventually to play the trumpet, which is how he not only learns to communicate, but also to woo a pretty girl swan.

It’s a beautiful thing.

What’s happening on stage right now is also a beautiful thing, but in a far, far different way.