Claire's World

Claire's World

( 10:27 AM ) Greg Griffith
The last 18 hours or so have been packed with those little milestones that make it unmistakably clear that We Are Parents. Claire began, with startling speed, to make big long sentences. Last night, holding her stuffed beagle, she said, "He’s the greatest, greatest doggie that I have ever seen in the whole world!"

This morning, she said, "Mommy, can my school friends come over to my house and play? Then we can share!"

Today was also Stacey's first day to provide the class with a "nutritional snack." Now to be honest, many parents have taken to bringing Krispy Kremes and such, and one parent even brought a bag of suckers. Stacey wanted to take something vaguely nutritional, so she made banana cupcakes with homemade buttercream frosting - orange all over with a sprig of green.

When Stacey got back this morning from dropping Claire at school, she had Claire's school pictures - our first. So we are Definitely Parents now. You can find the new picture by clicking the "Pictures" link.

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( 12:52 AM ) Greg Griffith
Claire spent the weekend with the grandparents, which often means going to church with Packy and LouLou. Occasionally, this also means I get tell people she's going to play with Flannery O'Connor.

I am not making this up. The curate at St. Paul's is Edward O'Connor, nephew of the legend. His 6-year old daughter is named after her, and happens to be a sweet child who has always taken Claire under her wing.

It got me to thinking about other Brushes with Great Southern Writers we've had. They are numerous, and range in character from the charming to the stupid.

The longest "brush" in history was the three years I spent in Frederick Barthelme's writing class at USM.

Then there was the miserable stint SDG did at the Ole Miss museums department, toiling under Susan, the wretched wife of the formerly drunken but always brilliant Barry Hannah.

Then there was the time SDG stepped into Square Books in Oxford to buy a copy of "The Firm" for her dad, and was greeted by a quiet man sitting on the staircase inside the empty store, who poured her a cup of coffee and made small talk. "I'm John Grisham... thanks for stopping by."

Then there was the time Dean Faulkner Wells, niece of the Great One himself, drink in hand, introduced herself and sat down with us for most of the evening as we dined outside in Oxford.

And for 13 years, until her death recently, we have lived only a short walk from Eudora Welty, perhaps the most famous resident of our famous neighborhood.

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( 7:17 PM ) Greg Griffith
The new pics in the "Pictures" section are from Claire's first school field trip, this morning, to the pumpkin patch at the Agriculture Museum just down the street on Lakeland Drive. There's a picture of her with her friend Charlie in the patch, and one of some of her classmates next to the hay bales.

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( 10:12 AM ) Greg Griffith
We just got back from the fair. This morning dawned rainy and gloomy, and SDG and I had to get Claire dressed and to school, so we could make a 9:30 presentation. The presentation couldn't have gone any better, but we spent the whole 90 minutes stealing glances out the window, willing the rain to go away.

When we left to get the bug from school, it had at least stopped raining. By the time we got home it had begun to clear up. Half an hour later, the sun was out. But instead of that crisp, mid-October cool that most of the world both expects and steps into, it was that distressingly muggy, warm Indian summer weather that Mississippi is so famous for.

Now, in most years past I would go to the fair one day during the week, for no other reason than to get a cheeseburger from Big Jim's on the Midway. Their hamburger patties are hickory smoked and ridiculously good, but during the rest of the year you have to drive 10 miles north to get one. For 11 days during October, I have to drive only 10 blocks.

But the reason I went when I did was because parking and admission were free. I've never been to the fair here when I had to pay for either. So in we pull, two adults and one kid, one car - fourteen bucks! Ho-kayyyy.... [peeling off ones and digging for that ten...]

And since it's been raining for the last 2 days, the entire ~~converted pasture~~ parking lot was soaked, pockmarked with giant puddles the size of Humvees, depth unknown. After stepping out of our immaculate (and recently paid for - woohoo!) Mercedes into ankle-deep mud, we threaded our way through the carnie trailers and over the threateningly thick power cables, and emerged near the midway between the Icee stand and the beef-kabob booth.

Ahh, the fair! Nothing like the smell of cotton candy and corn dogs. The sound of children squealing as they ride the crazy rides. The sight of a fat man with three rotten teeth blowing his nose directly onto the pavement.

I got the first foot-long corn dog I could find, and ordered the weenie-meister to slather it with mustard. After that, I pushed on purposefully to Big Jim's for the cheeseburger. Big Jim's is one of the few booths run by locals, not unwashed transients. The friendly lady behind the counter said, "What do you want on it?"

I looked at her for a moment, confused. You mean, I though to myself, people may choose what to put on the Big Jim's burger? But that would mean... oh my, the unthinkable - that some people might choose to exclude something.

"Umm..." I stammered, trying to understand my creeping indignation, What - are you hoping I'd attempt to list what I wanted, and risk leaving something out, some obscure but crucial condiment that only the Big Jim's staff knows about - brown mustard? vinegar? cumin-dusted capers? - which separates this sublime creation from the culinary abominations that infest this town like the plague?

"EVERYTHING."

Hmmph. They're not going to play me like a fool. I've been to the fair before. I know your tricks.

Glassy-eyed from the Big Jim burger, I shuffled into the path of the hucksters. Hey - you want to do what? Guess my age? Sure, here's three bucks. Why yes, I *am* thirty-sev---- DOH!!!

Next was the layup booth, at which I was sure to win at least something. Now, before I go any further, I should explain that as a kid, my dad pleaded with me not to waste my money on those ripoff games. But as luck would have it, one of my friends from school was also the son of the folks who owned the fairgrounds. So for a few years I would meet the kid there, and we would wander around playing games and riding rides, and all for free, because he had a wad of tickets and coupons that would choke a horse. This ingrained in me a sense of entitlement, unburdened by any sense of the money I would have otherwise had to spend had I not been availing myself of my friend's rolls of free tickets. This is important to remember as I relate The Tale of the Layup Booth.

The Layup Booth consists of a row of small basketball goals. The metal hoops of the baskets themselves are level with the ground, but the backboards are tilted back slightly. Not slightly as in, optical illusion slightly, but noticeably, obviously tilted back. As the ~~sucker~~ participant, your job is to stand about four feet from the goal and put your small basketball into the basket by bouncing it off the backboard first.

This is impossible to do. First, the small basketball they give you is so inflated that it will easily bounce 20 feet off the pavement if you put a little mustard on it (I know - in disgust afterwards, I tried), so a gentle loft toward the backboard results in the ball's rocketing back toward you.

Fine. So the trick is to gently loft it at the backboard. But knowing thiiiiiiis much about physics, I knew that a better approach was to minimize the angle of incidence so as to minimize the angel of reflection: Loft the ball high so it would strike the backboard as close to parallel as possible.

But loft it high enough to minimize the angle, and the velocity with which it strikes the backboard was still plenty to send it bouncing well past the front of the hoop.

So I lost on the basketballs.

I proceeded, though, to pop 3 balloons with 3 darts, and declined the gentleman's entreaty to give him $5 for another 3, with the promise that if I popped ANOTHER 3 balloons, the prize I took away would be even more enormous! No thank you, sir - I appreciate your giving me the razor-sharp darts for the first round; I will not pay you another $5 for the pleasure of getting handed three dull ones.

Long & short: I got a small consolation duck and a medium-sized whale for Claire. We stuffed ourselves with fair food, including soft-serve ice cream on the way out, and basically spent $40 faster than I have in recent memory.

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( 9:29 PM ) Greg Griffith
Shame on me for not posting in over 4 months. I would say, "It's been a busy summer," as if that's any excuse, but instead I'll just describe the momentous events of the past week, and remind readers that this has been pretty much business as usual around here.

Claire has been going to school! Well, it's a cross between mother's morning out and pre-school, but it's far closer to the latter than the former. A week ago, we noticed that something important had happened. Going to school ceased to be a novelty, one to which Claire's reaction was unpredictable. Sometimes she was excited to go, other times she would arrive and not want to go in. Now she looks forward to going, and her mom and I don't think about things to say to make it sound appealing. We just get in the car, go to school, and go about our business.

The second thing that happened - yesterday - was school pictures. This being our first child, and this being her first school pictures, it was a big deal. The night before, we had an impromptu fashion show as we decided what to wear. We settled on a long red Hanna Andersson dress ("Keep it simple around the face!" LouLou insisted).

Well, it turns out Claire enchanted the photographer, and became his model while he set up the lights and background. Her teachers told us how she smiled and sat with her hands folded while the photographer went about his business.

And today, SDG and Claire went to the zoo for the first time. They met one of Claire's friends from school and her mom, and spent the better part of the morning there. They saw a giraffe, elephants, two tigers, monkeys, bears, an owl, an orangutan, a toucan, pink flamingos, swans, a white peacock, two wolves, a big green iguana, a rhinoceros, several ostriches, tapirs, and a pygmy hippopotamus.

All this, and a trip to the beach (Seagrove), Claire's first... almost a month ago, which seems impossible. That's where the new picture came from (taken in late afternoon by mom - with a black-and-white disposable camera at that).

I made a promise that we would take sunrise walks on the beach, and I made good on 2 out of the 4 mornings we were there. At 5:30am, we rolled out of bed and headed down. The first morning, we saw a man in a little boat rowing across the small lake that came to within a hundred feet or so of the beach. Perched on the bow was a snow-white dog whose name, we learned, was Andy. When on the last morning we took our other sunrise walk, and saw the same man rowing the same boat across the same lake, Claire spoke up and pointed: "There's Andy! There's Andy!" That morning we also met Louie, a frantic little terrier owned by the most talkative man on the beach.

By the second day, Stacey's cousin Scott began plucking crabs out of the water with his bare hands. Seeing how plentiful they were, we went and got the net from the beach house's pool, and we were off. We started walking down the beach, and eventually found ourselves a good quarter-mile from where we started. Along the way, people standing on the beach would occasionally get our attention and point excitedly at the water. More often than not, we'd wade over and scoop up a few crabs. Over the next two days, we caught 3 or 4 dozen. The first night we made gumbo. The second we just had a big old-fashioned crab boil with potatoes and corn.

These same folks - the helpful beach-bound spotters - would usually come down to the water and ask us what we were going to do with the crabs. "Cook 'em and eat 'em!" was our standard response. They invariably asked us how we did it, and we gave them the standard speech about what to discard (lungs) and what was good to eat (anything that looked like crab meat, plus brains and fat). An older couple asked us how did we know what to eat. I said, "Are y'all from around here?" The woman shook her head and said "Oh, no... we're from Illinois," I said, "Well, in that case, I guess explaining it in terms of crawfish won't help." They were kind of taken aback at the explanation of how to cook and eat them (drop them into seasoned boiling water, but only if they're still alive... crack them open with your bare hands or the back of a knife... look for stuff that looks kind of like crab meat, but not quite - those are the lungs - don't eat them... but most anything else is good to eat).

Later, as I thought about the sight Scott and I must have made - me plunging the net into the water and scooping up crabs, Scott bringing them in from further out, holding the claws together with his bare hands, both of us looking like Tom Hanks in Cast Away - we must have gone a long way toward perpetuating the image of Southerners as half-wild neanderthals who get their food straight from the land - or in this case, the ocean - and view the killing and cooking of their catch simply as nuisances that stand between them and supper.

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