Curious

Monday’s usually my day to stay home and write. This week, the prospect was particularly welcome. Alas, it was not to be. Two feet of snow make the daycare ladies reluctant to shovel themselves out of their driveways; daycare was closed and the dear one and I had to find some diversions.

So, we saddled up the little stroller and headed off to the mall for the noon showing of “Curious George.” With tons of snow on the ground, rapidly melting, this was a calculated risk. I allowed an hour. The walk was long and slushy, but the dear one eagerly accepted our game of having to hop out and walk through the slush and then hop back in when the sidewalks were clear. We got to the theater fifteen minutes early.

I must say, however, that movie-going ranks up there with airline travel these days. How did something once so glamorous become so jarringly uncivilized? I paid my $12 for an adult and a three-year-old and got eight singles in change. They don’t stock juice or even lemonade let alone milk, so we (? I) settled on water. I paid my $3.50 for a small bottle of got five dimes in change. We settled down in the theater with all the other parents and toddlers and, by 12:30, the film still hadn’t started. The projectionist was stuck in traffic. There was no announcement, no apology, nothing: only word passed, parent to parent, in patient exasperation. Finally, the movie began, a full hour late. (It’s an 86-minute film.) I did run into another family in the (dreaded) Disney store afterwards (likely also buying an overpriced treat to placate a patient dear one) and learned that the manager, if I could find her, was passing out free admission coupons. I rammed the stroller back up the escalator and got two.

The movie, by the way, is very, very sweet. The dear one loved it and laughed aloud often and wept inconsolably when it ended. (But that was partly from the combination of pleasure, exhaustion, and the huge bag of peanut M & Ms that stood in for the lunch we no longer had time to get.) The man in the yellow hat works at the Bloomsberry Museum—a nice touch—which looks to be about where the Museum of Natural History is in New York and, in another nice touch, takes a ship called the H. A. Rey to Africa.

Curiouser, and more to the point, also bookish, I’ve been invited to join the Lit Blog Co-op. Overcome and flattered, I accepted immediately. We’ll see what the next quarter brings. For now, I am awaiting my first assignments and ordering the current READ THIS selection, Garner by Kirstin Allio. As a longtime and, I thought, distant admirer of the enterprise, I feel a little like, well, I don’t know. I’m excited!