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Unbelievable
Only God, the poet tells us, can make a tree. I just spent the last fifteen minutes making a meat flute.
Younger Girl has the last book report of the school year to do tonight. She's doing it on Pay the Piper, a book by Jane Yolen and her son Adam Stemple, a very nice rock-n-roll-n-faery take on the Pied Piper story. "And it isn't just a report. We have to do something to go with it. Like, make a diorama or a graphic novel or something. I'm going to make a pipe out of sausage."
When I picked my jaw off the floor we went off to the market and got a summer sausage (which really was too soft to carve nicely, but we learned this only by sad experience). As I am one of those who believes that these crafts should be done by the person who's getting the grades, I recused myself to take a phone call and left girl and knife in the kitchen. About five minutes later I hear screams of such anguish that I can only envision severed arteries. No, thank god. But there was severed sausage, and a good deal of angsty headbanging and screaming. Among the other things that came out of this, I learn that the kid has no clear idea of what it is she's carving, and thus the summer sausage had gone all to pieces and slivers, and she was full of woe. So when I had returned to my phone call and wound that up, I walked down to the cheese store and bought small salami (a pepperoni would have been better, but they had none, alas). Brought it back and had YG sketch the pipe she wanted (which looked, in fact, like a truncated clarinet). So I took out my knife and carved: bell at the end, nicked-in mouth piece, and four fingerholes. It is not, perhaps, a thing of beauty, but it does look like a pipe. Or flute. Or whatever.
Sarcasm Girl, flitting about on the edges of all this insanity, was falling over herself trying not to snicker. "Does she have any idea..." she asked, when YG was yapping happily about her meat flute.
"None," I said firmly. And that's as it should be.
Younger Girl has the last book report of the school year to do tonight. She's doing it on Pay the Piper, a book by Jane Yolen and her son Adam Stemple, a very nice rock-n-roll-n-faery take on the Pied Piper story. "And it isn't just a report. We have to do something to go with it. Like, make a diorama or a graphic novel or something. I'm going to make a pipe out of sausage."
When I picked my jaw off the floor we went off to the market and got a summer sausage (which really was too soft to carve nicely, but we learned this only by sad experience). As I am one of those who believes that these crafts should be done by the person who's getting the grades, I recused myself to take a phone call and left girl and knife in the kitchen. About five minutes later I hear screams of such anguish that I can only envision severed arteries. No, thank god. But there was severed sausage, and a good deal of angsty headbanging and screaming. Among the other things that came out of this, I learn that the kid has no clear idea of what it is she's carving, and thus the summer sausage had gone all to pieces and slivers, and she was full of woe. So when I had returned to my phone call and wound that up, I walked down to the cheese store and bought small salami (a pepperoni would have been better, but they had none, alas). Brought it back and had YG sketch the pipe she wanted (which looked, in fact, like a truncated clarinet). So I took out my knife and carved: bell at the end, nicked-in mouth piece, and four fingerholes. It is not, perhaps, a thing of beauty, but it does look like a pipe. Or flute. Or whatever.
Sarcasm Girl, flitting about on the edges of all this insanity, was falling over herself trying not to snicker. "Does she have any idea..." she asked, when YG was yapping happily about her meat flute.
"None," I said firmly. And that's as it should be.