Belle Weather (6 page)

While I’m all in favor of encouraging children to read, read, read, I don’t see why it always has to be Harry Potter.

Sure, plucky welfare mom J.K. Rowling scribbled her first book in a dank Scottish coffee shop whilst her precious baby napped in a stroller beside her dreaming of a life without coal gray skies, but enough!

And whither the baby-daddy? If J.K. Rowling had been a Southern mama, she wouldn’t have been hunched over her writing pad, trying to make enough money to never again tell the waiter, “I’ll just have the haggis.” She’d have his triflin’ ass in court, making sure that he was doing his daddy duty. On the other hand, if she’d married a proper Southern gentleman, J.K. might not have had the “wolf at the door” mentality while she wrote.

When you’ve got a husband who works a job, like me, you tend to put off writing projects in favor of trips to the mall “just because” and maintaining your winter spray tan.

Kids are wild about Harry and, in my daughter’s case, they don’t want to read anything else.

Sophie can spend hours discussing all things Dumbledore, Voldemort and Syrius Black. Because I have no idea what she’s talking about, she dismisses me as a “Muggle,” which I’m fairly certain isn’t Potterspeak for “Fantastic, Perfect Mommy.”

I just naturally assumed Soph would be reading Nancy Drew, just as I did at her age. Wrong, Hogwarts-breath. My kid is bored senseless by the wholesome adventures of the “athletic blond girl detective.” I suppose after reading about Harry and best friend Ron squaring off against ten-foot-tall furry black spiders inside a cave, the antics that ensue when you return a stolen locket to its rightful owner in the nursing home isn’t really that big a deal.

But I still think young readers are missing a great series when they skip Nancy. Who can forget how best gal-pals George and Bess helped her solve
The Secret of the Old Clock
? fueled only by kindly housekeeper Hannah Gruen’s yummy lemon bars?

Or how handsome widower father, attorney Carson Drew, encouraged Nancy to follow her detective dreams? Or how her Kendoll boyfriend, the alliterative Ned Nickerson, offered relaxing rides in his “roadster” for the gang at the end of every solved mystery? Or how everybody used “sleuthing” as a verb without cracking up?

No, no. Sophie will have none of that, preferring instead to read about games played in the air with flying brooms and followed by the drinking of dragon’s bile.

She speaks with great authority about Harry’s school, where magic is taught to the residents of “dorms” named Gryffindor, Ravenclaw, Hufflepuff, and Slytherin, hardly the kind of names one might see on the “Hello” tags at alumni fund-raisers.

My abysmal lack of interest in Harry Potter means that while Sophie can recite the intricacies of the plots in each book, all I can come up with is a bright smile and a “That Daniel Radcliffe guy is actually pretty hot.” To which she just rolls her eyes and looks as if she’d like to turn me into a teapot or toad.

Of course the whole world has Harry Potter fever. Although there is talk that Rowling will eventually kill our boy off, I’m pretty sure she won’t be able to walk away from the vast mounds of cash generated by this franchise, although she may tire a bit of all the dark arts stuff. We’ll know she’s getting weary when we read, sometime in 2010,
Harry Potter Goes Shopping at Wal-Mart and Buys a Coat Made in Cambodia.

Rowling, with her pre-orders in the millions and her fancy midnight release parties, is hot stuff but there was a time—oh, yes sirree Bob!—when the name of Nancy Drew author Mildred Wirt Benson was on everyone’s lips. OK, not really.

The truth is, if I don’t start reading, and liking, Harry Potter, I might as well be wearing an invisibility cloak around here. As Nancy would earnestly say, while adjusting her woolen tam, “Criminy!”

Soph and her friends are so into Harry Potter books that they actually spend time trying to write their own little books along similar themes.

This enthusiasm for writing at such an early age is downright shocking but, not to worry, the Scary and Over-Hyped State Writing Test for all fourth-graders should successfully quash the joy for the kids and, mercifully, book-writing can be left to the grown-ups who have, like, mortgages to pay and shit.

Writing has become a big focus ever since President Bush decided to prevail upon Congress to pass the “It Ain’t Right to Leave No Child Behind” law, which, mercifully, Laura Bush, being a former librarian
and
being completely made of wax, was able to make sound more smarter.

Before the Big Ooga Booga Scare the Pee Out of You State Writing Test, parents are told what to expect in a helpful “handout” that is sent home in their kid’s backpack, which means that it will most likely have a few moist Skittles stuck to it.

OK, here’s the sad truth: I’ve read the Skittle-soaked handout, like, eight times and I still don’t understand it. This means that either: (A) I have the brains of hamster dander, or (B) This thing really makes no sense.

The not-so-catchy title, “Classroom Assessment Analytic Rubric,” was the first stopper.

I have no idea what a rubric is. Maybe it has something to do with a Rubric’s Cube, but what would an obscure toy from the ’80s have to do with writing? Yeah, I know it’s not spelled the same. So Sioux me.

The funniest part of the handout was the notion that parents are supposed to help “coach” their kids to make sure they don’t blow it on the test by using sentence fragments, run-on sentences, or other no-nos. Or as I like to say when I’m feeling particularly writerly, no’s-no.

Being a Southern mama, I have to tell y’all that, right away, I sniffed a geographic bias in the test and here’s why.

This example was given for using a word the wrong way: “Pete wanted to sale the boat.”

Well, maybe that’s wrong; maybe not. If Pete is a Southern boy, he might not want to “sail” the boat as the snooty test-writers assume. He might want to fix up that rusty-ass john boat behind Paw-Paw and Mimi’s shed and “sell” the boat. In the South, we pronounce that “sale,” so there should be some consideration of that. I think.

It’s also important, according to the “rubric,” to use pronouns correctly on the “I Shit Myself These Questions Are So Hard” writing test.

The example of using a pronoun incorrectly was: “John and myself went to school.” They didn’t give a reason for why this was wrong so I can only assume if a fourth-grader ever said that sentence to another fourth-grader, he’d get the crap beat out of him for being uppity, the kind of kid who would brag about getting to sale his boat for big money.

Another frequent writing test pitfall, it turns out, is something called “incorrect formulations.”

Who that, you say?

The examples included words such as “hisself, theirselves and bestest.” Well, that’s just about the worstest idea I ever heard of. I
love
those words. Again, I smell the faint odor of geographical snobbery.

What right-thinking Southern child has never uttered the word “hisself,” as in “Billy Ray caught hisself on the barbed wire trying to get away from that bull”?

There is simply no acceptable substitute.

Because it wasn’t mentioned on the fancy-pants rubric, I’m hoping that the test will allow repeated use of another favorite Southernism: “theyselves,” which, of course, is the pluperfect plural subjunctive of the verb “they.” An example of correct usage would be: “They saw theyselves on
Cops
and weren’t even embarrassed about it.”

I told Soph I’d help her study for the Test That Can Literally Stop Your Heart. But I told her to remember: If she doesn’t do well, it “won’t” my fault.

At times, I wonder just how much you can really teach someone to write anyway.

A long time ago, I decided that I didn’t need any formal “edumacation” as my backwoods neighbor growing up called it.

And so, based on the advice of this albino woman who smoked Salem 100’s and peed outdoors, I decided to skip college and leap into newspapering at the age of eighteen.

So, no, I don’t have a degree and, as much as I’d like to have one, the whole notion of the work associated with it is as appealing as a Wham! comeback.

I’ll pass on the horror of being the oldest student in a roomful of flat-stomached Ambers and guys cute enough to be on
The Hills
calling me “ma’am.”

Don’t get me wrong. I have the highest regard for the non-traditional (old) students. But I’m too insecure to be the only student in the class who has to leave early, not to fetch the keg, but to rush to the Clinique counter because the moisturizer is on sale and there’s a free gift with purchase.

Besides, although many mommies do return to college, I’m basically looking for more, not less, “me time.”

I actually look forward to my kid’s dental appointments because it’s the only time in my life when I’m guaranteed at least thirty minutes of uninterrupted magazine reading.

It’s possible that I never had the right stuff for college. I do, after all, have a bit of a mouth on me.

Full disclosure: I did enroll in one college course when I was twenty-five because it was about TV’s influence on pop culture. The outline was delicious and the textbook fascinating. At the end of the semester, I ripped open my grade report and saw a “B.” I immediately told the prof that he had to be kidding.

“I’m the queen of TV and pop culture,” I reminded him. “I know the words to every single episode of
The Andy Griffith Show
including the disappointing Warren-the-deputy years. I can sing the theme songs to obscure ’60s Westerns like
Sugarfoot
and
Cheyenne.”

Sadly, the B stood and matters weren’t helped much when I told him he was a pretentious elbow-patched asshole whom I fervently hoped would someday take a very long three-hour cruise. Again with the mouth.

I whistled the melody to
Rawhide
AND
Tombstone Territory
on my way out of the room and into a life that would be devoid of a college degree.

The whole thing leaves me feeling a bit hypocritical as I caution Precious that she has to study hard so she can get into a good college.

“But you didn’t go to college and you turned out OK,” she says.

“You call this OK?” I shriek. “I should’ve gone to college! The other night on
Wheel…of…Fortune!
I missed every single puzzle, even the before and after one, and I always get that one. Remember how I got ‘Shaving Cream of the Crop’?”

“Yeah, I remember,” said Soph. “You called everybody we know to tell them. But so what? All that was left was the ‘m’ when you got it. Besides, I don’t think college is meant to help you with a game show. Maybe you should read more and watch TV less.”

Whaaaa?!?

I made the age-old and oddly annoying gesture people make to indicate that they’re talking on an imaginary telephone.

“Hello. Orphanage?” I said a bit too loudly. “Yes, I have a charming fourth-grader here who might like to go live with y’all on account of there’s
no frikkin way she’s related to me
!”

Soph rolled her eyes and returned to reading the latest exploits of the bespectacled junior wizard.

At night, with thoughts of writing tests and the disappointing lack of college degree swirling through my dreams—along with an oddly erotic dream involving Ned Nickerson and me doing unspeakable things in the back of his roadster—I realized that perhaps I was overreacting out of insecurity.

Weren’t there on-line college degrees available for people like me? People who just want the degree without the pesky homework and grading experience and inevitable encounter with the devil’s spawn, er, Young Republicans Club?

Perhaps I needed an on-line degree. I Googled some the nation’s finer fake universities the very next day and that’s when I learned about Trinity Southern.

A little more on-line research revealed that TSU might not be the best place to go to make my dream degree happen. Turns out a deputy attorney general, suspicious of the school’s degrees, submitted an application for a doctorate for his six-year-old housecat, “Colby,” based on the cat’s life experiences.

TSU agreed that Colby Cat sounded like a fine candidate for a Ph.D. but was rewarded for its generous interpretation of life education with a nasty charge of fraud.

Not to worry. I hear there’s a very qualified Pomeranian hoping to earn a TSU law degree someday soon.