Day 267 (In Which I Write a Story, With Some Help)

In useful news, I did two loads of laundry, went shopping, and baked brownies for Husbinator's birthday kiddush, and looked up how to cook marlin. (Last time I cooked marlin, I just threw it in the oven for about 15 minutes. It came out roughly the consistency of chewing gum. It tasted fine, but I had to shred it to make it edible.)

In "things I like about Israel" news, I yelled at some other people's kids in the park today. I did not ask them sternly where their mothers/fathers/nannies were. I just told them in no uncertain terms that they had to stop walloping each other. (In deference to my stern adult lecture, they ran to where I couldn't see them before [presumably] resuming their walloping. I win!)

In actual interesting news, one of the girls from across the street knocked on my door today to ask for help. She had to memorize a five-minute story in Englihs for class, you see, and she wanted to know if I maybe had something for her. The challenge was a fun one, but I didn't win: the girl is just old enough not to want to stand in front of her class and recite a picture book, but the words in Little House on the Prairie were too hard.

In the end, I wrote a (very) short story for the girl, with her input. I was going to have a nice long ramble about how this experience was so different than it would have been with an American middle/high-schooler, but on second thought, I'm not willing to draw passionate conclusions from one anecdote. So there.

(Now that you're curious, I'll tell you that she wanted the story to be very, very realistic: let the wind blow away the jump rope rather than have the cat steal it; if the wind is as strong as I'm describing it, perhaps the girls just shouldn't find the jump rope at all; don't have the jump rope blow all the way to her grandmother's house. I made the requested changes for her first comment, refused to write a sad story when she made her second comment [this blew her mind: as a child who was certainly read An Incident of Five Balloons as a baby, she knows that no matter how much you love your toys, the way of the world is that they will eventually leave you], and told her that if chasing the jump rope all the way to the grandmother's sounds too implausible, well, keep in mind that I never specify how far away the grandmother lives.)

Very interesting. Very tempting to draw passionate conclusions from this one incident. Now I'm hoping that more girls stop by and ask me to write stories for them.