“No, Mr. Stink, I expect you to die.”
We here at the Family Valued paperless office, open-air
garden shed, and maladapted pressroom have randomly selected a 10-year-old from
among the one immediately available.
So what do you think
of when I say “anthropomorphic espionage”?
I think of some word that I don’t really know what it means
and spies.
What have you been
reading lately?
Two books about a spy cat (The Stink Files by Holm & Hamel), and I’m reading a third one
that’s out. And I’ve read one book about a spy mouse (Spy Mice by Heather Vogel Frederick).
What’s with the
animal agents?
Probably because people like spies.
It’s America
and there are a lot of spies. They were in the first
World War and World War II.
When do these books
take place? What happens?
Modern times. The plot for Spy Mice, there’s these two children and
they get bullied by mean people and they find out about this spy mice agent,
Glory Goldenleaf. The big villain is a rat; he has
his own spy organization. He has Glory’s father prisoner and they try to rescue
him. The Stink Files books are about
Mr. Stink, a.k.a. James Edward Bristlefur. The first
book is about him adjusting to city life because he’s from London and he’s used to being out in all that
open space.
You know London is a city, a very
large city?
It’s not as cramped, you know? The second Stink Files is about a cat show and
chasing down a villain in the cat show. The third one
that I’m reading is about James Edward Bristlefur
winning a contest and him being treated like a king. Cats think of him as the
King of Catlandia.
What’s your favorite
part of the books?
“Do you expect me to beg for life?” “No, Mr. Stink, I expect
you to die.”
I would definitely recommend them.
— Craig Brownlie
Do you know who your parents are?
Memorial Day week hits me powerfully. Daily reports on the
horrors soldiers face in Iraq
and elsewhere make the sacrifices of all soldiers impossible not to respect.
For me, the week marks the anniversary of my mother’s death. This year, a close
friend lost his father and an employee lost her husband, both deaths — like
my mother’s — sudden.
It was in this thickly emotional context that I caught part
of Diane Rehm’s interview with Jean Said Makdisi, whose book Teta, Mother, and Me discusses the lives of three generations of
Palestinian women. Makdisi stressed how little most
of us ever know about our grandparents. We know basic facts, but next to
nothing about how their daily lives unfolded.
My paternal grandfather died young, but my father and my
uncle put together a biography a few years back. I’m enormously grateful for
this 18-page distillation of a life that, though it never directly touched
mine, shaped it in real ways. My children were 5, 3, and newborn when my mother
died, but mom left her poetry as a window to her deepest self should her
grandchildren become interested. I wonder, though, what my children really know
about their maternal grandparents, whom they see regularly.
How do we encourage our children and our parents to provide
a bridge to a better understanding? It seems the answer lies in the generation
between. But this requires not taking our parents for granted, which is one of
the most difficult transitions of attitude in all of life. Their deaths are
often the only spur, and by then it’s too late.
Some day, hopefully, our children will want to know who
their grandparents were. In all likelihood, the grandparents will be gone by
then. Be sure you know who they were so you can pass it on.
— Adam A. Wilcox
This article appears in Jun 14-20, 2006.
