4/20 🎂 Smiles

(with Divine Miz E... oh, the places she'll see!)

Greetings, and a visual-memory tour with granddaughter Miz E as she turns 8 this week.

The annual newShrink photo-album has gotten longer…

So has Miz E!

Just a few moments — wet and dry, on lands flat and high — from a packed past year that seemed to pass with lightning speed…

… As did the seeming eye-blink since spring 8 years ago, 2016. And yet, clichéd though it is, from perspectives of our politics, cultural shifts, and geopolitical events this also seems several lifetimes ago.

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The past year Miz E’s been enjoying gymnastics, still loves all things artistic, assembling stuff like Legos, and reading everything from Harry Potter to anything with unicorns. Her school is a “STEAM” one; the “a” adds her beloved art to the science, tech, engineering and math of STEM programs. This year she is also starting to write, enjoys “reporting” stories and has begun to like keeping journals. (All of the latter is of course heartwarming to her Tishie!)

Below is a favorite cartoon this week from Hilary Allison in The New Yorker. It provides a glimpse of what reading and story time with Miz E can be like these days. (I shouldn’t be surprised, and perhaps might have thought ahead more carefully before putting reporter’s notebooks in her little hands quite so young. Her standards for what constitutes a good story are daunting!)

In case the cartoon text isn’t legible here, the little girl is saying:

“Please tell me a story about a puppy who goes to Jupiter on her birthday to solve a mystery and is a mermaid, using an engaging and humorous tone, in approximately a thousand words, in the style of Ernest Hemingway.”

It looks like the desperate-Dad in the cartoon may need to power up his Mac to see if AI can provide some prose that’s fast and face-saving…

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But with the real child in this picture there is no face-saving, and artificiality doesn’t cut it. Miz E tends to be crystal-clear on her own many plot-lines, characters and discoveries. She is adept at bringing them to life.

Thank goodness.

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And, that is all I have! Talk to you soon.

🦋💙 tish

… it is important that awake people be awake,
or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;
the signals we give — yes or no, or maybe —
should be clear: the darkness around us is deep.
— William Stafford, “A Ritual to Read to Each Other”

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