Whit's Blog / 1000 Recordings

The Fog of Peace

Joe and I went down to the pond today to see what was there and what it all looked like. The day was dim and foggy. Joe's gloves fell out of my pocket, and I had to walk back for them, and then he wanted to go home, and I had to market playing Pooh sticks, and then we had to step lively to avoid the remains of the goose carcass. And the only duck we saw was an American wigeon that was ill-mannered in a quick flyby (but which was better than just quacking in the distance). We took some pictures, because the light was a nice little gift as well.

But while we were playing Pooh sticks on this unseasonably warm day, we did have a little strike of luck. While I was holding Joe's hand (OK, clenching it, as we leaned out over about six deep feet of black water), we saw a water spider slip back to the safety of a thatch of grass from the strong current flowing through a culvert. In December! My hero. 

Ingrates

"That's not very good of them," said Joe. "They should like that pretty bird in it's nest."

I could not agree more with his sadness at such vandalism.

Crossed

I'm a huge fan of cross-strip character use, both for satire (a favorite theme in Pearls Before Swine) and in earnest. Online-only (-mostly?) strip Pibgorn today slips over to the author's other property, the superlative 9 Chickweed Lane,  to usher in the bizarre farmer/alien Thorax.

What I get, for the asking

So I sing Joe a song from a kid's book, doing my best to read the music notation, and you know it can't be going well if you've ever heard me sing. (My brother-in-law said, memorably, when Joe was an infant, "In this picture Joe is not crying, which tells us that Whit is not singing." Even more memorably, when Joe was about two, and I was trying to sing him to sleep, he turned to me after 10 minutes of "I've Been Working on the Railroad," and said, "All done the music, Dad.")

And the song says that "you" are the greatest gift of all, and by "you" it means the kid to whom the book is being read. And I tell Joe that sappy or not, this is true. Joe is the best gift I have ever gotten. And he says, "Naaah."

What's better? I asked him.

"Well, there's the Buddah," he said, and pointed to the wooden likeness of the Buddah a friend gave me recently. A fine gift, is the Buddah, in all his incarnations, but no -- he's not quite a match for Joe. Which is how I know I will never master Buddhism.

Missing the Point

Joe and I are talking, and he says, "The class got a new mouse."

"Yeah?" I said, wondering how the school handles the passage of a beloved rodent. "What happened to the old one?"

"It couldn't work the computer any more."

And for a second, I want you to know, I envisioned a little white creature with whiskers and cute little ears, too rickety in its joints to type. The kid's three. How'm I supposed to know he meant the Xerox PARC kind of mouse?