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So the local Legion of Mary showed up on my doorstep the other day. I thought they had come round to welcome me to the parish, but their primary pitch seems to have been the suggestion that I ….. join the Legion.
While I admit that a great deal of what the LOM does sounds quite intriguing, at the same time I’m not very good at evangelizing. And I think if I brought the statue of the Virgin home to host it, Mrs. R would probably divorce me.
Still……I’m thinking about it.
The eight and six year olds, who have been working their way through the Laura Ingalls Wilder stories at bedtime, currently are in the midst of Little Town on the Prairie.
Although this is generally Mrs. R’s project, last evening I happened to be the one doing the reading. The chapter we read, entitled “Blackbirds”, contains a very long and detailed description of the dress that Ma Ingalls – with the help of her daughters – puts together for Mary in preparation for Mary’s heading off to college. The description covers materials, preparation, sewing techniques and seemingly every step from picking out the fabric to eventually buttoning Mary into the complete package.
Why is this subversive, you ask? Because I hadn’t the remotest idea what I was talking about most of the time and the gels were continually peppering me with questions that I simply couldn’t answer.
How the heck am I supposed to maintain my facade of Daddy Omniscience under such circumstances? It’s a conspyracy, I tell ya!
David Shannon’s A Bad Case of Stripes has been a bedtime favorite in our house for some years now. For those of you unfamiliar with it, the book is the story of little Camilla Cream. She loves lima beans but won’t eat them for fear of being made fun of. Indeed, she becomes so obsessed with being all things to all people and supressing her own individuality that she wakes up one morning with, as you can see, a bad case of stripes. Pandemonium ensues as this obsession gets completely out of hand, until finally a sensible little old lady convinces her just to go ahead and eat the beans and be damned to what anybody else thinks. Camilla ends by recovering her individuality (and her favorite lunch).
As the six year old and I were reading the story together last evening, a thought suddenly flashed into my head: I, at least, associate the rainbow these days with all kinds of liberal utopian ideas (the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition comes immediately to mind, for example). Is it possible that the author’s dig at the danger of inclusive conformity uber alles was meant to include such ideas? (True, Camilla morphs into various patterns and shapes as the story goes on, including stars and stripes as the Pledge of Allegiance is being recited at school, but still, the underlying image is, as emphasized by the title, the rainbow-y stripes.)
Just an idea, but an intriguing and possibly delicious one given the political climate into which we suddenly find ourselves plunged.
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