What I've Been Doing Instead of Writing, Halloween Craft Edition

I’ve watched some soccer and started teaching an adult literacy class. But mostly I’ve been working on Sonar Halloween costumes. Please click to embiggen any photo.

Last year Sonar X11 was a headless guy. This year he started with a conceptual costume, “The Balance of the Universe,” but may transform this piece into a black and white jester or clown. Oh, and no, I didn’t do this. He is eleven and needs me only to run the sewing machine from time to time.

Sonar X11’s Halloween maskLast year Sonar X8 was Gimli the Dwarf. This year, continuing the martial fantasy theme in a slightly different direction, he wants to be Sir Lancelot. He made the sword. This one gets to reuse the Santa boots that Sonar X11 wore in third grade. En garde, villein. 

Sonar X8’s Knight of the Round TableLast year Sonar X6 was a recycled Harry Potter, so this year he wanted something splashy. I balked at the Instructable for the Indiana Jones Lego Minifig, but we came to a compromise: regular minifig, built my way. We still need to cut out the face so he can see when he wears it.

Sonar X6’s Lego Minifig headThe primary materials here are two pool noodles and an empty oatmeal container. Plus some yellow sheets of foam and a good amount of duct tape.

The guts of Sonar X6’s lego minifig costume piecesWe spent Sunday morning goring up the front of the house. We inherited the grave stones from awesome neighbors (I think they’ve been pictured here before), but the bloody paint sheets are ours. The cheerful mums are for irony, of course. Not pictured is the entire scene backlit by a red porch light in the dark, a smoke machine, and a Sonar dispatched behind a sheet to surprise passersby.

Instant graveyardVisitors must pass through the bloody plastic to get to the front door. Plus mums.One view from the front door. The little guy makes a lot of noise. 

Sex Ed: It's So Amazing! by Robie H. Harris and Michael Emberley

This review is part of my ongoing quest to choose great resources for helping the Sonars understand their bodies, their sexuality, and sex.

It’s So Amazing!: A Book about Eggs, Sperm, Birth, Babies, and Families by Robie H. Harris and Michael Emberley, Candlewick Press (first paperback), 2002.

Harris and Emberley have created a series of three books called The Family Library, which aims to be a resource for families to help kids understand sex and sexuality in a warm, open, funny, and honest way. Harris’s text and Emberley’s colorful illustrations are built from consultation with a long list of experts, as well as kids and families. Targeted at kids seven and up, we’re led through each chapter by Bird (who is curious and enthusiastic about learning about sex) and Bee (who is more skeptical about whether he really wants to talk about any of this stuff). The characters might feel condescending to older kids, but make a great vehicle for mirroring the kinds of anxieties and feelings real kids might have when faced with the mysteries of the human body and sex.

Drawings of both internal and external human anatomy are clear, and the cartoon-style of drawing softens the giggle factor of representing naked bodies. My favorite set of drawings are the life-cycle illustrations, showing what bodies look like as babies, young children, older children, adolescents, adults, and older adults. The biological mechanics of sex, pregnancy, and birth are explained in some detail, and chunks of text are moderate in length and balanced by heavy illustration.

Sex is presented as one kind of Loving behavior, and attention is given to different types of loving behavior that don’t involve sex. The book doesn’t address individual desire or identity, but does try to directly define words. Definitions for terms, even controversial ones, are given without judgement. Descriptions of the many different family configurations that exist in our society are extensive and normalized, again without addressing desire or the controversy that some relationships can inspire. Only when defining masturbation do the authors acknowledge potential controversy. In all other cases, the authors lean toward objective definition.

The tone of the book is respectful of kids, acknowledging that they may have heard or know a lot of things, and fills in definitions and blows up myths that may confuse kids. This is a great book for prepubescent kids who are ready to understand more about human bodies and human families, and introduces foundational concepts that will become important as kids grow.

Three out of four ain't bad: a triptych

While it rained, he stood at the window of his apartment playing a scratched violin. With only three strings, he had to adapt his musical arrangements. He was grateful once more that the E — the high string — was the missing string, and not any of the others. Those high notes scraped the inside of his brain anyway.

***

The little girls are dressed in their best clothes. Their grandmother starched and pressed the little dresses until they could have stood on their own. Their curled, brown hair is pinned away from their cheeks by matching yellow bird barrettes. Grandmother made them matching sweater-coats, smart little wool jackets to keep their blue dresses tidy and keep out the autumn chill. The polished shoes are buckled now, but the soccer ball abandoned under the practice goal will be irresistible soon. The tiny scuff marks will be scolded and then buffed away.

***

Two men play accordion inside the little Bavarian restaurant. The building was made of several rooms that had been added on and patched together over the past 100 years. In the nineties, the owner tried to make the place brighter by putting thick white stucco on all the inside and outside walls. Chalkboards display the hearty offerings of the day: two meals, two appetizers, two kinds of beer, and two accordion players. 

A Book A Week: Snowdrops by A. D. Miller

Snowdrops by A. D. Miller, Doubleday, 2011 (library copy)

“Snowdrop. 1. An early-flowering

bulbous plant, having a white

pendant flower. 2. Moscow slang.

A corpse that lies buried or

hidden in the winter snows,

emerging only in the thaw.”

When you turn the first page from that epigraph, you’ll get a glimpse of a snowdrop (definition 2.), but just a glimpse. Much of the early book feels like it could become a noir crime story. At any moment, the gruesome or violent bubbles just below the surface of the increasing tension. 

But this is not a detective novel nor thriller. The mystery that unfolds is the puzzle of denial that Nick Platt builds around himself. Nick, writing from the safety of Britain and his upcoming wedding, tells us—or rather his fiance, for the book is a written confession to an unnamed person he is hoping will still want to marry him after reading it—about the last winter of his four-and-a-half years as a lawyer in Russia. About the secrets that damaged his career and haunt his thinking. Nick allowed himself to be lured into two bad situations, both of them involving fraud, both of them hiding violence. Nick doesn’t experience the violence himself. The story is not graphic except for that one glimpse of a corpse discovered in the melting snow. Nick’s actions and inactions and intentional thick-headedness enable violence to happen. In truth, the crime would have happened with someone else if not with Nick—his seductresses indicate as much when it’s all too late to change. They call him their Kolya, and avert their eyes when he seeks explanation. 

The colder the Russian winter gets, the colder the narrative feels, the more disconnected Nick becomes from a sense of responsibility and legality. Nick is what happens when we willfully look the other way, how we become culpable for our own ignorance. By the end, I was angry at Nick—not as angry as I imagine his fiance might be—but angry at his pathetic excuses and his inability to relinquish his desire for the trappings of corruption. Nick’s desire is perhaps the more gruesome snowdrop, eclipsing that thawing and decaying glimpse. For the found body merely underscores Nick’s collusion in fraud.

In spite of my anger, the book kept me hooked to the end. A frosty, atmospheric morality tale.

Holding on to the obvious and overlooking the essential

The story I’m working on right now depends on survivors holding on to the obvious and overlooking the essential. In other words, the most important objects in a character’s life are ignored by her survivors because they latch on to those things that have an obvious intrinsic value or the sentimentality of a known family-story association.

Look around your personal space. Look at the things that you treasure. Would your family or loved ones treasure them as well? Would a stranger treasure them? Do you have any objects in your space that are important or significant for you but would appear innocuous or worthless to someone else?

If you died or disappeared and someone, even someone very close to you and very familiar with you, sorted through your things to remove objects of sentimental and financial value, what would be left? Would something important to you be left behind? 

I’m finding it almost impossible to be able to look at my possessions objectively. Would you pick up this green plate on my desk? The one that holds a smaller bowl of paper clips and a chapstick and charm bracelet? You might. It’s finely worked and stamped on the bottom. Perhaps you’d pick it up to check its value, but you wouldn’t know that although I associate it with my mother, it’s not as important to me as the gargoyle on the top shelf for maternal remembrance. What about these giant rubber bands that hang from my lamp? They’re cool and were sent to me by a good friend. I think of her every time that I look at them, but would you pitch them into a box of random office supplies and not give them a second look? Would you know that the foot-shaped paper clips remind me of Sonar birthdays? How about the mustache on the face of the computer? Would you pitch it when saving the Mac, tossing along with it a memory of Halloweens and silliness?

What objects would I overlook in your space?