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Bad angel, good angel.
Nov. 17th, 2007 10:10 pmBad thing:
I am working with a dreadful person. Her name is Effie, and she's got soulless eyes, and may in fact be Satan himself. Last night she made me cry.
Good thing:
Last night, again, a woman came to the register with her daughter, maybe three or four years old. The mother ran to the back of the store to get something she'd forgotten. The little girl squinted at me over the counter, then pointed to the Archie comics.
"Are these joking books?" she asked me, in a very critical little-kid voice.
"Sort of," I replied.
She picked one up and looked at it consideringly. "Does it have rhymes?"
I'd read a lot of Archie comics as a kid, but couldn't remember any having rhymes. "I don't think so," I said. "Just pictures."
"And words," she pointed out triumphantly as she flipped it open, giving me one of those hard, disapproving looks that children give you when they think they've caught you in a lie. She jabbed at one of the speech bubbles, in which Reggie was telling the other Riverdale boys that he didn't blame them for making a move on his girl, as she was such a doll. Or maybe peach. "What does this say?" she asked.
We stood there for a few minutes, her finger moving from one bubble to another as I read to her, feeling slightly foolish, bits of dialogue put in the mouths of teenagers with seventies vocabularies and eighties wardrobes by old men who'd forgotten both of those decades, and she nodded, very seriously, filing it all away somewhere for reference.
Her mum came back to the counter, flustered, and apologized for holding up the line. She told the little girl to scan her candy- I think it was a pushpop- and then told her to thank the nice lady.
She said "'nk you," and then asked her mother if they could buy the comic, since it had jokes in it, and I wondered what she'd be like when she learned how to read.
I hope she'll find a really good book someday, one that smells like libraries do on rainy days, one with someone else's name scrawled in pencil on the inside cover. I hope she'll fall in love with it. I hope she'll curl up on a comfy chair and get lost and won't come when dinner's ready.
I am working with a dreadful person. Her name is Effie, and she's got soulless eyes, and may in fact be Satan himself. Last night she made me cry.
Good thing:
Last night, again, a woman came to the register with her daughter, maybe three or four years old. The mother ran to the back of the store to get something she'd forgotten. The little girl squinted at me over the counter, then pointed to the Archie comics.
"Are these joking books?" she asked me, in a very critical little-kid voice.
"Sort of," I replied.
She picked one up and looked at it consideringly. "Does it have rhymes?"
I'd read a lot of Archie comics as a kid, but couldn't remember any having rhymes. "I don't think so," I said. "Just pictures."
"And words," she pointed out triumphantly as she flipped it open, giving me one of those hard, disapproving looks that children give you when they think they've caught you in a lie. She jabbed at one of the speech bubbles, in which Reggie was telling the other Riverdale boys that he didn't blame them for making a move on his girl, as she was such a doll. Or maybe peach. "What does this say?" she asked.
We stood there for a few minutes, her finger moving from one bubble to another as I read to her, feeling slightly foolish, bits of dialogue put in the mouths of teenagers with seventies vocabularies and eighties wardrobes by old men who'd forgotten both of those decades, and she nodded, very seriously, filing it all away somewhere for reference.
Her mum came back to the counter, flustered, and apologized for holding up the line. She told the little girl to scan her candy- I think it was a pushpop- and then told her to thank the nice lady.
She said "'nk you," and then asked her mother if they could buy the comic, since it had jokes in it, and I wondered what she'd be like when she learned how to read.
I hope she'll find a really good book someday, one that smells like libraries do on rainy days, one with someone else's name scrawled in pencil on the inside cover. I hope she'll fall in love with it. I hope she'll curl up on a comfy chair and get lost and won't come when dinner's ready.