Plucky Letters to US soldiers in Iraq

January 17, 2005

Dear Rob & Buddies,

Yesterday Rudy and I took Katie (my niece) out for breakfast after church. We always enjoy dining out with Katie because she is a nine-year-old curmudgeon.

Nothing is sacred to Katie. We were at Circuit City the other day and she wandered off, so Rudy went looking for her. He found her standing in front of the video cameras watching herself stick her own tongue up her nose on closed circuit television. She’s actually quite talented and can insert her tongue a good quarter- inch into her nostrils, but that’s just not the sort of thing the management of Circuit City care to broadcast over their video monitors as a means of enticing potential customers to buy expensive camera equipment. We had to leave the store after she demonstrated her “unique” ability to the Store Director in person at the front desk.

So there we were at breakfast yesterday, and Katie had a whole new list of complaints on which to dwell. Her third grade teacher, Mr. Ford, plays jazz music to “relax” the students when they are working hard. Katie says she HATES jazz music. In her opinion, Mr. Ford should play only rock music, preferably “Arrowsmith” or “Creed.” Katie also does not approve of Mr. Ford’s playing of “Schoolhouse Rock” videos during winter inside recess. She claims that the “Conjunction Junction” feature is “obviously JAZZ!” She says, “If they’re going to include jazz songs like “Conjunction Junction,” where do they get off calling it Schoolhouse ROCK anyway?”

Rudy said that is a question worthy of Andy Rooney

Katie likes to decorate the placemats at our favorite after-Church-breakfast place with her “unique” artwork. At Christmastime she drew us a charming scene in which four darling children knelt before a sparkling Christmas tree. Unfortunately, Katie likes to tell a story as she’s drawing her pictures, and invariably something goes horribly wrong. In her Christmas picture, for example, she ultimately had Santa approaching the children from behind gripping a club with which to beat the dickens out of them in a bloody fury. (“Santa found out they were bad,” she explained.)

Rudy, not being an actual parent himself, encourages her in these artistic depravities by saying things like, “That’s pretty good, but maybe you should add a little more blood in the lower left corner.” One of these days he’s going to wind up in jail.

As we sat down to yesterday’s breakfast, Katie announced that she’s gotten pretty good at drawing tables & chairs lately. With that in mind, I asked her to draw a nice picture of the Bush family having dinner at the White House. She took pen in hand and immediately decided that the White House has burned to the ground and the Bush family has to live in the house next door, which is, in her own words,
“A shack, a shack too small for even real people to live there, but the President has to live there, or tell people he can’t, which he would never do else he might get bad news told about him on TV for saying out loud that it’s a shack.”
(Well, at least we know Katie is politically savvy and understands the nuances of media hyperbole and class warfare.)

With Rudy’s misbegotten guidance, she drew a lovely picture of the Bush family: George, Laura, Jenna, and Barbara, seated around a table eating turkey, steak, peas, mashed potatoes and, of course, Bush’s Baked Beans. (I have the drawing in front of me now, as I am saving it as evidence for her future husband/parole officer/psychiatrist.)

In this masterpiece, Katie has rendered each Bush family member with a word balloon above his or her head, thus allowing the Bush’s to engage in dinner table conversation, which goes as follows:
George Bush: “Darn, you burnt the turky, Laura!”
Laura Bush: “So-rry!”
Barbara Bush: “I’m not eating that! EIUUU!”
Jenna Bush: “I want a beer!” (followed by a belch, spelled out as “braaub”)
Laura Bush: “Excuse yourself!”
George Bush: “Amen!”

On the reverse side of this placemat, Katie began illustrating her “Tale of Shamu,” in which she claims to have befriended the world famous celebrity whale and been ferried around on his back in one of his fabulous Sea World shows while the rest of her family suffered simultaneous diarrhea attacks in the Sea World bathrooms, which is why they can neither verify nor refute her claim of having met and befriended Shamu. That’s also why nobody took any photos of her riding around on Shamu’s back that day. Her mother took the camera into the bathroom and so, alas, there is no photographic evidence of Katie and Shamu frolicking together on that wonderful day when they met and became good friends for life. (See "My Tale of Shamu" enclosed.)

While Katie was notating her Shamu story, I noticed she was forming her lower-case “f” incorrectly and I pointed it out to her. She insisted it was correct, although it was clearly either an uppercase “L” or a lower-case “j.”
We went back and forth on the issue and she claimed things have changed since I learned to write in cursive “about a thousand years ago.”

“Besides,” she said, “my teacher told me I am a really good eff-er.”

Pardon me, did you say,
“A REALLY GOOD EFF-ER??”

The instant it came out of her mouth, Katie knew she’d made a colossal and, to us, hilarious blunder. To her credit, she made an immediate attempt to backpedal, shrieking,
“I mean he said I’m good at writing cursive letters! That’s what I MEANT!”

I believe her, of course, but it’s much too little and much too late.

I now have a permanent image etched in my mind of this perfectly respectable third grade teacher sitting down to a parent-teacher conference saying,
“Damn, that eff-ing Katie of yours is one good little eff-er!”

I can almost hear the jazz music playing in the background.
(Conjunction junction, what’s yo’ function? Hookin’ up words an’ letters an’ phrases…)

Hey, Rock & Roll Cleveland, right?

Much Love,
--Mom