The bisque is recommended

Fenner also spent a few years in Washington, working for the Justice Department, and he shared quite a few meals there with John E. Smith, a lawyer from Atchison, Kansas, not far down the Missouri River from St. Jo, who was then working for Senator Dole and later became the house attorney of an Omaha trucking company.  Fenner still likes to talk to Smith about eating in Washington - the Cuban food at the Omega and the Middle Eastern food at the Calvert Cafe and the chili at Hazel's Texas Chili Parlor.  Fenner believes that Hazels' recipe was so secret that she carried it with her to the grave, although some other Washington eaters believe that it was handed down intact to a man with a tattoo, and still others believe that it was not the sort of recipe anyone would have to guard very closely.*  Fenner's favorite restaurant in the Washington area was the renowned Silver Spring fish house called Crisfield Seafood Restaurant.  He misses practically everything about Crisfield's. 

"They know how to treat children," I heard him say once. 

"They know how to treat oysters," said Morisseau, who did some eating in Washington himself.**

My Dad used to have lunch at Crisfield's pretty often because it was just a few blocks up Georgia Avenue from Hopkins APL where he worked, but I have an even better connection to Trillin's paragraph:  Two of the people who "knew how to treat children" at Crisfield's were Ned and Nancy, my friend Mollie's parents.  Ned ran the raw bar and Nancy ran the cash register and you'll never meet two nicer people.

I got to know them during the years that Mollie and I were housemates and during part of that time Mollie was the day care provider / favorite aunt / playmate for then babies and later toddlers, Charles and Samantha. Mollie's folks are the kids adopted grandparents and even though Ned and Nancy have retired to North Carolina, the families are still close with lots of visiting.  They do know how to treat children.



*Crisfield's is still open in the same location.  Omega closed after a fire.  The Calvert Cafe was renamed Mama Ayesha's in 1994 after its founder Mama Ayesha Abraham, who died in 1993.  It's still be run by her family.  And Hazel's Texas Chili Parlor is also closed but is the gastronomic mother, if not legal entity parent, of chili parlor chain Hard Times.  This article from DC's City Paper tells the fascinating story.

**Alice, Let's Eat by Calvin Trillin.  Page 122 in the 1978 copy of the Vintage Books paperbook I have.

On this one, I think Lucy is right

Up here on the 8th floor, the snow definitely seems to be coming up.

LUCY
And way up there,
The little stars and planets,
Make the rain,
That falls in showers.
And when it's cold and winter is upon us,
The snow comes up,
Just like the flowers.

CHARLIE BROWN
Now, Lucy, I know that's wrong. Snow doesn't come up,
it comes down.

LUCY
After it comes up, the wind blows it around so it
looks like it's coming down but actually it comes up
out of the ground- like grass. It comes up, Charlie Brown,
snow comes up!

CHARLIE BROWN
Oh, good grief!

"Little Known Facts" from You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown, lyrics by Clark Gesner, ideas by Lucy, Lucy by Charles Schultz.

Team

Something happened at precisely that moment. Both Claudia and Jamie tried to explain to me about it, but they couldn't quite. I know what happened, though I never told them. Having words and explanations for everything is too modern. I especially wouldn't tell Claudia. She has too many explanations already.

What happened was: they became a team, a family of two. There had been times before they ran away when they had acted like a team, but those were very different from feeling like a team. Becoming a team didn't mean the end of their arguments. But it did mean that the arguments became a part of the adventure, became discussions not threats. To an outsider the arguments would apppear to be the same beause feeling like part of a team is something that happens invisibly. You might call it caring. You could even call it love. And it is very rarely, indeed, that it happens to two people at the same time -- especially a brother and a sister who had always spent more time with activities than they had with each other.

From From The Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler by E.L. Konigsburg, the only juvenile fiction I've ever read that contains a map of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

How to fill your e-mail inbox*

1. Click the "like" button on Facebook for a friend's picture of their cute children.

Ta-da! You're done! Sit back and watch the e-mails roll in!


*I was going to call this post "How to Get More Interesting Mail" in honor of the Direct Marketing Association's booklet for people who wish to receive more rather than less junk mail. But Facebook comments aren't junk mail - they're the conversation.

Just like the good old days

The best thing about playing a tiny part in a kid-dominated show is that I have lots of down time at rehearsal. So Karen and Felicity and Julie and I can gossip to our heart's content and I can work on my crocheting*. It all reminds me very much of my days in Gilbert & Sullivan choruses. No one will remember that I was in the show but I'm having a lovely time helping to put it together.


*I am making a scarf or two or three for women serving in Afghanistan, a project that my friend Pam alerted me to.

Notes

"At the end of every rehearsal, we have what are called "notes." If they're not about you, they're boring but if they are about you, they're important."

Amy, giving the best summary I've ever heard for the last few minutes of rehearsal.

She is directing her second show which has a large cast, 90% of which are children, many under age 6, most doing their first show. She is my hero.

Best Bio Ever

I do the programs for Silver Spring Stage and I see a lot of theater. Nonetheless, this is the best bio I have ever read.

Samantha (Sprintze) is a 6th grader at [school] and is overjoyed to be part of Fiddler on the Roof Jr. This is her first time ever on stage. She loves acting, singing, swimming, and cooking. She would like to thank her Aunt Leta for getting her into theater, and Mr. Johnson for the training.

Family-friendly theater

In the middle of the front row of the dress circle on the rare occasion of the first performance of an original English play sits a young lady of fifteen. She is a very charming girl—gentle, modest, sensitive—carefully educated and delicately nurtured—very easily flurried and perhaps a little too apt to take alarm when no occasion for alarm exists—but, nevertheless, an excellent specimen of a well-bred young English gentlewoman; and it is with reference to its suitability to the eyes and ears of this young lady that the moral fitness of every original English play is gauged on the occasion of its production. It must contain no allusions that cannot be fully and satisfactorily explained to this young lady; it must contain no incident, no dialogue, that can, by any chance, summon a blush to this young lady’s innocent face.

Well, gentlemen, I have no objection to this young lady. I think, on the contrary, that the presence of this young lady has exercised a most wholesome restrictive influence on the character of our few original plays, and I shall be sorry indeed if the day ever comes when her parents and guardians will find it advisable to prohibit her attendance on the occasions I have described. I look upon her presence at my own “first nights” as a direct and most gratifying personal compliment—the more so, as I happen to know that, on no account whatever, would she be permitted to be present at a première of M. Victorien Sardou or M. Alexandre Dumas.

But when a comparison is instituted between our original English drama, such as it is, and the drama of France, such as that is, I think that the restrictive influence exercised—and most properly and wholesomely exercised—by this admirable girl should be fully, freely, and frankly admitted. And it is a never-ending source of wonder to me that, with the whole gamut of human emotion to play upon; with no restraining influence of any kind whatever; and with the dead certainty that no innocent girl of fifteen will ever run a chance of being affected by their improprieties, the dramatists of France can only ring out threadbare variations of that dirty old theme—the cheated husband, the faithless wife, and the triumphant lover.

(reprinted in The Era, Feb. 21, 1885, p. 14 from a speech by W.S. Gilbert)

I am really right

The only thing better than being proved right is being proved right about the same thing more than once. Being proved really right.

Okay, so four years ago we established that my friend Samantha's theater job is that of stage manager. At the age of seven she was noticing as much about the technical stuff as she was about the story.

She is now a very pre-tween 11* and, it seems, has not changed in her basic nature. She may sing and dance - she has been cast in her school's upcoming "Fiddler on the Roof" as one of the younger daughters and she also sings very nice solos in church - but she is a stage manager at heart.

How do I know this? Because her cousin Charles (the future producer) was in the 6th - 8th grade play at school which I saw on Friday and Sam saw on Saturday**. Our conversation after church on Sunday went like this:

Me: So did you see Charles's show?
The Stage Manager DBA an 11-year-old-girl: Yeah. The scene changes took for-ever!
Me: I know!
The Stage Manager DBA an 11-year-old-girl: Charles said they only had two people moving sets, but ---
Me: -- even so!

I think for her next birthday I'm going to buy Sam a bunch of black long-sleeve t-shirts to wear backstage while she calls shows.

And next month Charles and I (and the rest of the crowd) will be seeing Sam in "Fiddler." I'm also willing to bet that The Producer DBA an 11-year-old-boy will have some suggestions for how to improve the gross.



*Some 11-year-olds are still little girls, some of them are seconds away from teendom. Sam is 11 going on 17 and yet still a sweet girl withal.

**And he was adorable. His best moment was as the train conductor in an early scene. He warns the New Yorkers to avoid Lonesome Polecat because of the big feud going on. They are determined to go. And with his father's deadpan delivery Charles says "Well, I hope you've got lots of insurance." "Insurance? Why?" "Ricochets."

For Charles

Devoted readers will remember that one of my functions in life is to lose to Charles at Monopoly. I'm not sure if Scott Meyer's tutorial will improve the experience for me, but it's worth a shot.

Like Communism

During Anne of Green Gables Maggie, Susanne, and I would would wait for our Act I, scene 5 entrance off stage left. Maggie, who is 13 would be holding the doll playing her little sister and she would smile into its sweet little plastic face and say kindly (and very quietly) "I hate children."

Later on she quoted her boyfriend:

"Children are like communism. Good idea on paper, but the real thing? Not so much."

For my friends who are parents

And there are many of them and they are very good parents. Bless their hearts.

I’m nearly a decade into parenting, if you factor in pregnancy (and I choose to, because I view pre-natal vitamins as the preparation for a lifetime of sacrifice). So it’s embarassing to admit what just occurred to me as I doled out food that morning to various mammals: parenting is the only job besides combat soldier where you wake up on the job. Sure, some lawyers work punishing hours and have been known to sleep at the office on occasion, but no one has ever walked into their bedroom in the dark of night and demanded a re-analysis of tort reform.

Not only do you wake up on the job, you frequently wake up to information which would make a lesser person try to hide in the box with the ski-clothes. Which parent among us hasn’t awakened to the fact that a) There’s a lot of vomit in their house, b) It’s someone else's vomit, and c) It’s their job to take care of both the vomit and the person who is currently generating more vomit. And need it be said that a sleepless night or two with children hosting an especially energetic stomach virus – one that causes the washing-machine to actually die from overuse – should result in a little extra bonus in ones parenting paycheck? Of course, in the real world, the extra bonus is the parent getting the stomach flu, which arrives the morning the parent has signed on to monitor a field-trip to a pig farm.

"For What It's Worth" from The QC Report blogged by Quinn Cummings.

Posted while listening, no kidding, to "Sweet Child of Mine" on the radio...

Still a bad influence

I got to see my friends David and Gwyn this past weekend at the Sing-Out (more on that later) and I got to hang out a bit with their adorable children.

When last I saw D&G, their daughter Dorrie was about 2-ish and their son hadn't even signed in. Dorrie is now 6 and John is about 3. At two Dorrie was a bit shy around strangers - she had a nicely polished, very effective "I don't know you, why are you talking to me" look, but at six she wants to tell you about her missing tooth and the gold dollar the tooth fairy gave her and how she is not going to spend it. John wants to be physically attached in some way because if you are going to like someone, you should really, really like them.*

And as the Baroness remarked about a man finding nothing more irresistible than a woman who's in love with him**, very few adults can fail to be charmed by small children who seem - out of an entire room of grown-ups - to find one's self the most fun to hang with. I know that I can't.

So we hung out and chatted and stuff.

And then I offered the Box Office Ladies coffee. (They were stuck in the box office most of the weekend, so whenever we had food or drinks or anything, we'd always offer some to them. They are very nice to us.) Dorrie and John wanted to help, so it went thus:

Dorrie added the creamer to the cup at my direction;
I swept up the creamer that chose to land on the table instead of in the cup (not Dorrie's fault - it's powdered creamer and you know how that stuff can be);
John supervised.
Dorrie shook down a packet of sugar and added it to the cup;
I told the children to step back from the table and added the coffee;
John supervised.
I stirred the coffee and Dorrie volunteered to carry it over.
John and I ran interference while Dorrie threaded her way with a hot beverage through a room full of oblivious adults;
I remembered to tell her that if the coffee started to slosh too much, she should just walk slower or stop for a second or two;
Dorrie arrived at the box office with no spillage whatsoever and received a very nice thank you from Kathy the Box Office Lady.

A little while later it occured to me that I might have asked their parents before I turned the children into waitstaff but if they are interested in theater, it's probably a good skill set to have.

And it's probably just as well that they are back home and out of my reach lest I teach them how to make Martinis in that same "think of it, do it, consider the implications later" way.


*Which means that John and I have a real bond because as many people can tell you, that's pretty much my M.O. Or, as I put it to Doug, the castmate playing my husband, when he asked about my boundaries regarding staging a scene "well, I'm rather tactile and I pretty much don't have any, so go for it."

**Not my experience at all, by the way, BLTP.***

***"But let that pass." A little rusty on our G&S acronyms? After this past weekend, I'm not. Not at all.

How to amuse upper management

1. Be the very cute and intelligent 7-year-old daughter of one of our senior engineers;
2. Attend a day camp that gets out around 3:00 so that you need to come to Dad's office every day for the week that your Mom is at a conference;
3. Be charming and engaging when chatting with Dad's co-workers and gamely smile at the joke that almost everyone makes about how you're our new hire;
4. When asked by my Boss what you're doing right now, sigh, and say "Ohhhh, just waiting for 5:00."
5. Smile gamely again when told that you already sound like the other engineers.

My Boss and his Boss told this little anecdote to prett' near every other senior staffer they could find. I know that I heard it repeated at least three times in the hour after it happened. So if Matilda ever does wish to work for us, she's already got several people who'd be willing to hire her. Including me as she has commented more than once that I type very fast.

Graduation

My niece Angela graduated from Radford University this month. And because we are a very modern family, here is the list of her cheering section:

me (her maternal aunt)

Daddy (maternal grandfather)
Audrey (maternal step-grandmother)

Bruce (step-father)
Jennifer (step-father's girlfriend)

Cheryl (sister)
Brian (sister's boyfriend)
Brie (sister's boyfriend's daughter, about 10)
Emmie (sister's boyfriend's daughter, about 6)

Travis (step-brother)
Heather (step-brother's girlfriend)

Samantha (step-sister)
Amaya (step-niece, about 4)
Shania (step-niece, about 2)

Valerie (step-aunt)
Taylor (step-cousin)

Jean (step-grandmother)
Les (step-grandfather)

Christina (father's ex-wife, so former step-mother)
Joshua (half-brother, about 7)

The sharp-eyed reader will notice a couple of things:

1. That her mother and father weren't present. My sister, Sara, passed away unexpectedly a few months before Angela graduated from high school. But she was there in spirit. Angela's father couldn't be there, although I don't know why, but not for so unhappy a reason.

2. That of the 20 of us, only four are related to her by blood which was one of my favorite things about the whole affair. We don't normally spend too much effort remembering exactly how people are or aren't related unless I'm playing Southern Chess* and my thought for the day was that we just make that vague circle-waved-at-shoulder-height gesture and lump us all as family if anybody asked. The only ticket for admission was loving Angela and wanting to celebrate this milestone with her.

It was a lovely day and the University made some very good decisions:

The graduation started with a plenary session on the lawn, so when there weren't enough seats, the late comers (or the just before the Pomp and Circumstance comers, like us) could just plop down on the grass in the sunshine. Or the shade. Which also meant that during the speeches, the little kids could run around on the lawn every so often without bothering anybody.

Of course, it also meant that when Travis was near to fainting from hunger, he and few others (including some of the smaller children) could sneak off to IHOP for breakfast. This only became a problem when Angela found out about it, although she was somewhat mollified to learn that they didn't bug out until after she marched and the speeches (please contribute to the alumni fund, please don't forget the alumni fund) began.

Then there was a recess which allowed everyone to meet back at Angela's apartment - right across the street from campus! - before we headed over for her college's graduation.

There was a reception before her college's graduation with sandwiches, chips, a veggie & dip platter, and a cake. The cake had a picture of Angela and her class mates on the top and enough sugar in the frosting to keep the children jazzed through the end of the day. We got to meet several of Angela's friends and their families and we got to sit in chairs at tables which are much better for juggling plates and drinks than a big, open room.

Angela pointed out her favorite professor, who, she said, totally changed her attitude about school. "How?" she was asked. "Well, she was really hard on me which I hated at first but then I got to like it." It seems she liked having expectations to meet and sometimes exceed. Good on her!

She officially graduated from the theater, so I felt right at home. And she graduated with two of the other small colleges, so there were only about 140 or 150 names to go through, rather than everyone's.

Her degree, by the way, is in Recreation, Parks and Tourism,** so I'm assuming that the National Park Service looms large in her career goals. And her favorite professor is also the favorite professor of most of her college so the ovation when she was introduced was long and enthusiastic.

And every single ceremony was Mamet-ianly short and to the point. That was the best choice of all.

Congratulations, Angela!!


* Southern Chess is when you sit around figuring how people are related and I'm actually pretty good at the generations and the removeds.

**I would have punctuated that with the terminal comma so that Parks and Tourism doesn't look quite so much like a subtitle, but they didn't ask me.

A lovely view from up here

"Where a goat can go, a man can go; and where a man can go, he can drag a gun"
- Maj. Gen. William Phillips, as his men brought cannon to the top of Mt. Defiance in 1777

On Friday I got a nice e-mail from Brett saying that he and son Charles would be hiking Section A of the Billy Goat Trail on Saturday morning and would David and I like to go? David was nursing a case of the sniffles, but I was free and so I rounded up my hiking shoes and we met up at the Visitor's Center.

In general, the best way to get me to do something is to make the information about the activity available and then assume that I won't actually look things up or figure out what I'm getting myself in for.

Like, for instance, that time we were at DisneyWorld and - as I hadn't read up on any of rides, a rather interesting choice for someone who is afraid of heights and has a poor sense of balance - I wandered blithely past the sign saying how tall, how not pregnant, and how free of heart conditions one must be to go on the ride. In fact, I believe that my exact comment as I sashayed by was "Oh, I'm definitely that tall. I'm more than that tall." La, la, la.

And just as I realized that I was in line for a roller coaster and started to try to figure out how to get out of line, Brett, Stacey, and John started telling me that we were in line for the Happy Train to Mickey's Birthday Land or something. I'm not all that bright sometimes, so even that didn't actually cause me to realize what was up. Or rather, way up. And once I did, they just hustled me on board cheerfully talking over my pitiful cries for help.

Not that the DislandWorld folks were going to rush to my rescue; they found the whole thing hilarious. Humphf. I am so put upon.

So anyway, yeah, all I knew when I signed on was that Brett would be there and Charles and that we would be outside on what was supposed to be a beautiful day.* So I followed the link that Brett sent and confirmed that, yep, the visitors' center was the one that I was thinking it was, and went on about my business. I suspect that Brett could invite me to spend six months with his family in a bathysphere**, send me the plans for the vehicle and a list of necessary supplies and health warnings and my brain would file it thus: Brett! Charles! Cate! Something about the beach!

Cate, sadly, couldn't join us this time because she would rather scrub floors than go hiking with me.***

So on Saturday, we met up at the visitor's center and set off on our hike. The first part, which is, well, which is the tow path is very easy. Then the trail breaks right and we leave what's pretty much a semi-paved road and start scrambling over little rocks. No sweat, I can do this. Just keep alert so that I don't turn an ankle and I'll be fine. Heck, this is probably good for my knees! La, la, la.

Then the rocks started to get bigger. To turn into boulders, actually. Around this time, Charles started scrambling up them and announcing how easy they were, which was almost precisely not what I was thinking. The boulders looked like this:


Around the time that the boulders were getting big enough to make me hope that Section A is a loop and that I wouldn't have to meet these rocks coming back the other way, we came round a bit of trail and I saw this:



The Wikipedia caption for the photo calls it the "Billy Goat Trail Cliff." After I got to the top of it, I named it the Cliffs of Insanity**** and began to hope in earnest that we were on a loop. We were and the Cliffs of Insanity was the most "strenuous" part of the trip.

And as I got used to scrambling I got better at it. Not great, but better. I stopped overthinking every step and just took them. And I started treating the relatively flat tops of the boulders more like sidewalks and less like tightropes. It's possible that I am the only person who noticed this blossoming surefootedness, but it still made me feel better.

Especially as while Brett is one of the best people you can have at your side for this sort of thing - supportive, non-judgmental, patient - Charles is, after all, ten years old and being better at things than adults is like getting two desserts and no green vegetables for dinner. So it made him pretty happy to tell me about every blaze he beat me to (most of them) and every rock he climbed better than I did (prett' near all of them).

At one point he was outlining his system for continuing to destroy me, blaze-wise, and I pointed out to Brett that Charles seemed to follow the example of the sort of criminals that Batman always sends back to prison because they'd rather talk about their plan than actually kill Batman. "Yep," agreed Brett, "he's a monologuer." Of course, your average Batman villain stands more or less in place while monologuing and Charles can do it while scampering up a boulder pile in a way that reminds you why both children and young goats are called kids.

I will be revenged, however. Some day Charles and I will be lost in the trackless desert or shipwrecked or something and my contribution will be to smirk and say "Oh, you're so smart -- you get us home" and then go back to reading whatever script was in my purse when the disaster happened. I'm kind of looking forward to this, actually. The best revenge is revenge against harmless small children. (The next best revenge is when someone who is always right - and I know many of them - has to admit in front of other people that you were right and they were wrong. This happens far less often that I would like.)

Anyway, after our exhilarating hike - and it was, I worked up a bit of a sweat and definitely met my target heart rate at least once - we walked back to the car and headed off for a nice lunch with ice cream for dessert. I was also able to give Brett the box of Girl Scout Cookies I had bought for him, which made us both happy.

And I have a picture of the Cliffs of Insanity taped to my hutch at work to remind me that I actually climbed those rocks. And lived to tell the tale.


*It was a beautiful day, just as advertised. Don't worry - this isn't some kind of foreshadowing.

**I'm also not really a fan of small, enclosed underwater spaces.

***Truthfully, she had a prior commitment to help with some pre-Easter Spring cleaning at her church, but that's not what Brett said. Not does it make the best story.

**** I know, not very original, but it seemed pretty accurate to me.

For Noah

I have to watch tv on Sunday evening.



Especially as I think I recognized someone in the trailer.

So unless you're Johnny Depp, I'm not taking your call during the show.*

With thanks to Silver Spring, Singular


*Some exceptions possible, but I wouldn't count on it.

Grown up plays

The first play that I remember seeing in a theater is Shaw's Mrs. Warren's Profession in London. I was 14.

Dad and I were visiting England while we were living in Belgium and he got us tickets. I don't know what his criteria was in selecting that play, but I loved it. I have long since lost the program, but in the dim, murky recesses of my memory there are still impressions of dresses and movement and speech. There were definitely stripes. Maybe on the wall paper, or the furniture, or maybe on the dresses, I don't know, but there were stripes. I'm sure that I didn't understand all of it, but I got most of it and have been very fond of Shaw ever since.

Well, Samantha has me beat. She is ten and her first grown up play - i.e., one that doesn't involve bright, cheerful characters asking the audience for help, or Disney characters on ice skates - was Arcadia. She was there on Saturday night.

At lunch after church some weeks ago, Stacey and I were talking about the show and Sam said that she wanted to go. Hoping to give her more of a sense of the play (i.e., lots of math talk, very few chase scenes), I asked her to run some of my lines with me. We ran a chunk of Scene 2, carefully picking up reasonably far after Hannah's "I'm going to kick you in the balls" and left off reasonably far before Bernard's "The Byron gang are going get their dicks caught in their zip..." and when we were done, she said "I wanna go see this play!" all bright-eyed and enthusiastic.

I don't think that she has developed a life-long love of Stoppard at age 10, although it's not impossible as she is a very bright girl, but I do think that what she wanted was to see a play where I was on stage instead of in the house.

So Sam and Stacey and Cliff and Eileen came on Saturday night and, even though the show lets out at 10:45, she was all bright-eyed and enthusiastic afterwards in the lobby. I was so surprised and enchanted to see her there that I may have largely ignored other friends as I dragged her around to meet as many of the cast as were still around. But then, I am usually an idiot in theater lobbies post-show, so that night may not have been different from all other nights. It's basically just me with more adrenaline.

We have a date to see the next kids show at Elden Street, but I'm thinking that if she can do Arcadia, I may have a companion for some of my upcoming WATCH assignments. Especially as - oddly enough - Arcadia may actually be the most kid-friendly thing I audition for this year.

You only hurt the (little) ones you love

From talking to my friends and reading blogs and from a few other sources I've decided that if you haven't accidentally - and minorly* - injured your child in some way**, then you just aren't spending enough time with them.

Heck, one of my mother's cousins was lifting me out of a pool when I was about 8 and I slipped and hit my face on the concrete. Chipped a front tooth. "How can I send this child back home to her mother now? We broke her!" his wife said.

And I once failed to prevent my niece from shutting the car door on herself. Between her sobs and my "oh, honey, oh sweetie" noises she gulped out "I --- like --- you --- and ---I --- love --- you." So it's sort of a treasured memory, in a painful, cringe-inducing kind of way. Go figure.


*no pun intended. Oops.

**Carrying them and bouncing their heads off of door frames, cutting their hair and scraping them with the scissors, bathing them and getting water up their noses, stuff like that.

Charles's real estate empire

For now, it's only pretend, sure, but of all the people I've ever met, Charles comes closest to being a mogul capable of conquering all worlds that lay before him. At least that's my conclusion judging from playing Monopoly with him. He is Charles, Landlord of Worlds. With hotels on them.

I went out to Annapolis on a couple of Sundays ago to (wait for it....) see a play. And since Brett and Cate and Charles live on my way home, I left a message before I went into the theater, more or less inviting myself to mooch dinner off of them. Well, not "more or less." I, in fact, left a message inviting myself to mooch dinner off of them. When I emerged back into the bright sunshine* there was a message waiting for me that Cate and Charles would love to be exploited in the name of friendship.

So I headed out to visit, and Cate and I got caught up, and Cate got an advance birthday hug, and we three had a very nice dinner of home-made beef with broccoli and brown rice. Brett, alas, was not home, so I scarfed up his share in addition to my own.**

After dinner we had enough time before Charles's annual bath*** for a quick game of Monopoly. Charles and I come from slightly different Monopoly traditions but we do agree on one of the important of the traditional (if not formal) rules - that a 50 (dollar or pound depending on which of Charles's several versions we are playing) and any penalties incurred are paid into the center and the pot is scooped by whomsoever lands on Free Parking.

We vary in that Charles believes that each player begins with two houses and a hotel. I've never heard of that before, but it works out okay because as soon as Charles has acquired his first monopoly the game is on it's downward spiral, so advancing him some of the construction costs is really just a mercy for Charles's opponent (i.e., the loser. i.e., me.). I mean, how much 9-going-on-10-year-old gloating is a grown up supposed to endure?

So we set to playing and Charles rolls out the strategy that has served him so well. He buys prett' near everything he lands on, tells me the rental, tells me the rental with hotel, rubs his hands together gleefully, and in general behaves like Scrooge McDuck would after finding a quarter on the sidewalk. I am slower to purchase - got to save my cash to pay Charles all that rent - but Charles seems to hope that I am buying properties merely in order to flip them and so offers me reasonable profit if I will allow him to take that nearly worthless land off my hands, you know, more as a favor to me than anything else, really. This last would be more convincing without the gleam in his eye and the used car dealer deameanor that emerges, but what do you expect -- he's only 9. If he were able to complete cover his basic childlike greed and be a smoother huckster, it wouldn't be fun to play with him, merely frightening.

So I sell him some stuff, but not much, and watch my savings dwindle as I meet expenses (hey, just like real life!). Around time that I'm starting to feel the pinch, Charles deploys the second of his sure-fire strategies. Let's remember that Charles's father and grandfather are gamers. But even so, this kid's dice skills are amazing. Why does he always buy Boardwalk and Park Place? Because he lands on them first, of course. (Yes, naturally, I would buy them if I landed on them first. I only look like an idiot. No, I only land there after the Charles Plaza is open for business with its oily concierge smiling at me.)

Why does he get venture capital levels of cash infusions from landing on Free Parking? Because his die rolls take him there. (I'll land on Free Parking a couple of turns later and pick up the solitary 50 from the echoing vaults.)

Between his good head for business and some die rolls that are more miraculous than any crying saint's statue ever was, it's just a matter of time -- a very short matter of time -- before I lose. And then he does the Dance of Joy, sometimes recapping for me great moments from the game that I might have managed to forget. Or will manage with the help of intoxicating beverages once I'm home.

From reading this, you might think that I am only playing with Charles because I'm such a nice person who does things for children to make them happy. Not really. I'm a spinster with a cat and most of the things that deeply interest children, I don't care about at all . And I'm too selfish to spend much time pretending that I do. So the children closest to me have largely learned to take an interest in my hobbies. (The benefits to knowing me are nearly without end, as you can see.) Charles's Nintendo baseball game that he loves? Ehh, never touched it.

But I do like Monopoly and I do like Charles. And I am fascinated by playing Monopoly with him because, in general, Charles is one of the most polite, adult-aware children I know, so it is really interesting to me to see his rapacious, piratical side given free (if temporary) rein.

Maybe it's an only child thing, but he moves in between kid and adults worlds much more smoothly than a lot of other children I know and definitely better than I did at his age, when I was self-involved and oblivious (just like now). Charles and smart and funny and well-behaved and plesasant and, in my opinion, a great credit to his parents. I kind of wish they'd raised me.****

One time we were going to play, but we lingered over dinner too long and it got too late and Charles had to get ready for bed instead of do his impression of Alexander the Great across the game board. When told this, he didn't pitch a fit, he just said okay. And moved on. Again, I wish I were that well behaved.

I'll keep playing with him, but I figured that by the time he moves on to some other game, I will have lost enough money and property to him to buy up and build hotels on several nearby planets.

Charles, Landlord of Universes.


* It was a lovely day in Annapolis and I can only credit the fact that I found parking an easy walk to the theater on a street that has an ice creamery that sells ice cream that they make themselves right there that was very, very yummy, especially on an end-of-summer/beginning-of-autumn great-for-ice-cream-eating kind of day to some of cosmic, karmic thing. I'd better do something real good real soon or some bad, bad juju is coming at me.

**Though p’r’aps I may incur your blame/ The things are few/ I would not do/ In Friendship’s name!

*** Just checking to see if Cate reads this. Charles is actually a very clean child.

****Well, actually, in some ways they did. I have learned an awful from my friendship with both them and I owe them more than I can repay. I also love them both a bunch.