i was on the train this morning, standing and being a little zonked out and unawake but generally in a happy mood and going over the bridge where you can see the sunrise and the statue of liberty and its cool, and this little girl with messy blond hair and baggy courderoys, prolly 8 or 10 was sitting next to where i was standing and in some audible-only-to-mothers voice asked to look at the ………. and her mom was like i’m doing this now, but here, and was peeling through the kids bag and after a second gave up and said you find it, and went back to doing whatever grown up thing she was doing on her phone. and the girl pulled out one of those paper scholastic book catalogues!
do you remember those?? they were the awesomest! i loved those. that and BookIt were prolly my two absolute favorite things in elementary school and i had totally forgotten about them.
the girl (judging by the embroidery on her backpack, i’m going to say her name was helen) proceeded to totally happily, humming to herself, start checking off things with a pencil and doing careful finger-counting arithmatic so she could fill in the little order form on the back. it made me grin like an idiot, and then really self-conciously try to pretend i was looking somewhere else because the mom started giving me a weird look for ogling her kids scholastic catalogue (as is only right) – but the nice side effect of the mom’s concern was that she closed up her phone and sat down beside the kid and they started talking about the books too, and what she could get and what wasn’t a good idea, and it was nice to listen to.
just darn nice.
when did we stop getting scholastic? were they not cool enough? i remember them being pretty darn cool. don’t you?
31 January 2008 at 5:33 am |
I remember the year they stopped…I think it was grade 5, and our teacher was all “it’s just a big paperwork headache, with such limited choices, you could all go to the LIBRARY, or a BOOKSTORE and pick WHATEVER YOU WANTED.”
The scholastic canada hq is on king street, I bike by it sometimes, there’s mural of clifford the big red dog that you can see through windows.
31 January 2008 at 9:11 pm |
YES! clifford is pretty much the emblem of that era of childhood.
i also remember loving the scholastic books. i was always arty, and they had these books where you could trace different faces — pick your nose, mouth, hair, etc. and all this tracing paper and ou could make good caricatures. i sort of knew i was supposed to just draw things, but these were sooo much more fun.
i’m glad the scholastic catalogues still exist — and it’s not just online or something…
2 February 2008 at 9:35 am |
i loved scholastic!
but i also had a moment of yay! reading this because i was lurking near people today at target to listen to the happy and functional mother and teen son and elementary school daughter interactions.
i reiterate how i want to live near you when/if i have kid. but i also want other people to have kids? does anyone else want to have kids?
2 February 2008 at 3:26 pm |
i know other people who are having kids, so i feel the likelihood is high. i would like kids but feel sort of a bastard for how much planning has to be involved and how much using of resources and population expanding when i am so naturally capable of NOT having them, that it’s extraordinarily unlikely i ever will…
scholastic ny headquarters is in downtown manhattan, and architecturally it makes me grin hugely, because it feels like a building-sized version of one of those paper catalogues, but i went in at some point around when i moved here and was disappointed that a lot of the kids books i was liking at that moment were not represented and the selection was actually pretty conservative… but its still that frisson of “ooo – i remember that! that was awesome! i’m glad kids still get that!!”
and really nice to see positive parent child interaction, especially on hectic weekday morning train ride!
4 February 2008 at 6:00 am |
i am procrastinating from my project.
you could adopt: that would be none-population-expanding, or you could use the old-school baster method… :)
you would be such a good mom! but if you decide not to, you can be my co-mom.
happy birthday!