Cold Case

I saw the new Sherlock Holmes movie a couple of days ago, and coincidentally, I recently happened to catch a few episodes of the TV show The Mentalist, as well. There is something about the deduction that these characters demonstrate that resonates with me. I have the sense that the all clues we need to decipher most situations are always there, if only we have the patience and intuition to find them, and I like it when those guys amaze us with how it can be done.

A few days before Christmas, my mother and my nephew, Richard, made a gingerbread house. With the extra dough, they cut out two gingerbread people to go with the house. One was liberally decorated with green sprinkles and the other just as festooned with red. Later that day, Richard approached my mother with concern. "Grandma," he said, "the green cookie is missing! We have to start an investigation."

Naturally my mother considered the most likely suspects. "Let's ask your mom and dad and sister," she suggested.

"I already talked to them, and they didn't do it," he assured her. "I have a clue, though. I found a little yellow feather by the gingerbread house, and I think it was a duck!"

By the time I arrived that night, there were two clues: a yellow feather and a quack that Richard heard around the time of the disappearance. Believe me when I tell you that we pursued the case of the missing cookie all weekend long. How did the duck get in? Where did it go? What had become of the cookie? And even when we were at the park, Richard questioned the geese, but they hadn't seen any yellow ducks.

In the end, we gave the cookie up for lost, ignoring the trail of green sprinkles that led to a certain four-year-old detective.

Ehhhg-cellent

I'm a big fan of David Sedaris, mostly because he's such a master of the personal narrative. Yesterday on the plane, I finally had the chance to read his latest piece, Loggerheads, that was published in The New Yorker a couple of weeks ago. In particular, I admire the way he weaves seemingly disparate anecdotes together thematically to construct an integral whole. (Way to go, Dave!) On the same flight, I also read an essay about creative nonfiction by Marion Winik in the Winter 2010 edition of Teachers and Writers. I've long been a fan of hers as well; I know her from her personal commentaries on NPR. In the article, her analysis of the genre is fascinating, wide-ranging, and even forgiving of James Frey. All of this is exceptionally timely, since I plan to start on memoir with my students when we get back in January.

In the spirit of Sedaris and Winik, I like this genre because it is so accessible and yet so powerful. It validates kids by giving them a chance to tell a story that is important to them, and encourages them and their readers to find a greater meaning in the tale. Not to mention that it offers so many opportunities for writing instruction, both in craft and convention, as well. Pardon me while I rub my hands together in gleeful anticipation.

The Myth of Objectivity

I had the occasion to fly today in the wake of the failed underwear bomber. It was a domestic flight, and honestly? There was no discernible difference between this trip and the one we took on December 23rd. Strange experience, then, to get home and watch the news where the lead story on at least 2 national broadcasts was how much our traveling lives will change because of this incident.

The older I get, the more critical I become of the media. There is a saying that goes something like, if when you're young you're not a liberal, then you have no heart, and if when you're old you're not a conservative, then you have no brain. I'll never agree to that, but I do believe that as we gain experience, it often becomes harder to trust people, while at the same time it's much easier to see that institutions are made up of those same people.

This Is America, Dinosaurs

My four-year-old nephew loves The Land Before Time series of movies, and in general my sister supports his fondness for them (he owns several of them on DVD), but the dino-speak drives her crazy. For example, to dinosaurs, the moon is the night circle and snow is frozen sky water (never mind the sky puffies, pointy seeds, and sinking sands). Why can't talking dinosaurs speak regular English?

Think of the harm on impressionable children... for a while, my nephew referred to volcanoes as "smoking mountains"and earthquakes as "earth shakes." But maybe they're trying to translate real dinosaur mouth talk into something we can understand-- in that case, I guess it's just the price we have to pay for extreme prehistoric realism.

As God Is My Witness

An amazing sunset tonight here in Atlanta: the sky flaming red and dark pink, textured by clouds like so many rags wrung and laid twisted to dry. All that was missing was Scarlett O'Hara, fist raised and vowing to never go hungry again.

Treasure

My older nephews and I have been geocaching together for years, and now that my youngest nephew, Richard, is four, he wants in on the treasure hunting. It seemed like a perfect holiday afternoon activity to take a walk to the park and look for a cache that is hidden there. Over the years, we've found almost a hundred caches, and it's safe to say that we find what we're looking for more often than not, so it was a confident party of seven who set out between opening our stockings and the big holiday dinner. The cache we were after was only rated one out of five stars for challenge, and I was expecting a quick and successful initiation for Richard into this fun pastime.

Long story short, we couldn't find the treasure, and he was a little disappointed, as we all were. We promised to look again tomorrow when the light was better, but as we were walking home in the gathering darkness, Treat and Richard were ahead together on the path. "Hey guys," I heard Treat say. "I found the treasure!"

Richard stopped dead in tracks, his eyes open wide. "He's just teasing you," I told him.

"No really," Treat continued, and before I could scold him, he said, "The treasure was inside me all the time-- it was friendship!" He was kidding, but his voice was so sweet and sincere that I had to play along.

"Friendship and the love of family, right?" I asked him.

"Right," he confirmed, and we all walked on together toward the lights of home.

Comfort and Joy

Thirty seconds until Christmas, and I find myself furiously typing to meet a self-imposed deadline. No excuse to miss even a single day, and what a day it's been. From the first cup of coffee in my sister's kitchen this morning to the finishing touches on the easel we put together for Santa to bring to my niece in the morning, it has been a busy day spent with family preparing for the feast tomorrow, and the nicest thing about it all is that my whole family will wake under the same roof in the morning and rise to celebrate the day. We'll catch our breaths and remember that this is what all the fuss has been about.