Baseball, boggarts, and broccoli
Jul. 25th, 2004 08:45 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
eve_primeAfter the last two days, 89 felt blissful, which must be why I acquired a mild sunburn. Around noon we went to the baseball diamond at the middle school for D's first experience swinging a bat. He was really pretty good, for a first-timer who is not quite four, and loved doing it. He was batting over 400 and a couple of times hit it way out past his daddy, the pitcher. If you could see the expression on R's face in this picture, now too tiny for that, you could tell that this isn't a just-pitched ball, but rather, a just-hit one:
Today I read The Boggart and the Monster, in which the boggart from yesterday's book has adventures with the creature in Loch Ness. When I said yesterday that Susan Cooper's writing is literary, I didn't mean in the sense of "more suitable for analysis than fun" -- I really meant sensitive to people and places and gifted with language, that is, a notch above "good storyteller." The kind of writer who gives the impression that she's deep and thoughtful, even while writing for young people.
Anyway, the boggart only spoke in Gaelic (though he understood English), and it was neat to know approximately how things should sound and to recognize a few words and even understand a whole sentence: "Tapadh leibh." Well, that just means "thank you" (pronounced "tahppa lev"), but that's something. It reminded me of my first experience overhearing and understanding someone speak naturally in another language: my aunt's German-born friend Anke asking, "Wo ist mein Photo, Papa?" while looking for her camera on the west shore of Puget Sound at a place we called Uncle Dick's Beach, when I was 12. (A pretty trivial sentence to have made such an impression on me!)
I finished off the peaches and nectarines today. D. wanted me to buy broccoli at the store and clutched it all the way home like a prize. Reminds me of his brother.
Today I read The Boggart and the Monster, in which the boggart from yesterday's book has adventures with the creature in Loch Ness. When I said yesterday that Susan Cooper's writing is literary, I didn't mean in the sense of "more suitable for analysis than fun" -- I really meant sensitive to people and places and gifted with language, that is, a notch above "good storyteller." The kind of writer who gives the impression that she's deep and thoughtful, even while writing for young people.
Anyway, the boggart only spoke in Gaelic (though he understood English), and it was neat to know approximately how things should sound and to recognize a few words and even understand a whole sentence: "Tapadh leibh." Well, that just means "thank you" (pronounced "tahppa lev"), but that's something. It reminded me of my first experience overhearing and understanding someone speak naturally in another language: my aunt's German-born friend Anke asking, "Wo ist mein Photo, Papa?" while looking for her camera on the west shore of Puget Sound at a place we called Uncle Dick's Beach, when I was 12. (A pretty trivial sentence to have made such an impression on me!)
I finished off the peaches and nectarines today. D. wanted me to buy broccoli at the store and clutched it all the way home like a prize. Reminds me of his brother.