The S&G Journals

I bought the kids journals this summer. Well, it's the G-man who writes and writes and writes. About ten minutes after he learned that letters could be strung together into words, he was writing away, working laboriously page after page. We have some of these pages. Goodmarneengmynameis

is the usual greeting, followed by his full name, and whatever was going on in his mind. One details his distress that it's a holiday, and mydaddyworksfarrawayfrommetooday. He wasn't big on spaces between words. Still isn't.

My big plan was to give him a composition notebook that he could write in during the summer and tell stories and draw pictures. He's forever doing that, detailed line drawings of large insects engaged in battle with rocket ships circling planets. He goes in for surreal space opera.  

He loved the journal. He wrote his name on the front, and his grade. He put Spiderman stickers on it and on the first page he wrote, "My favorite sea creature is" and then he drew a picture of a jellyfish. I was all misty-eyed when he showed it to me. Sammy got  a little journal, too, and she put Dora stickers on hers. She likes to write squiggles and pretend they're stories. And she draws like you wouldn't believe. Birds. Birds and princesses.

They're having a lot of fun with it, and I'm jealous. So I dug through my old pile of blank notebooks, and found one that I got for 25 cents at Building 19, a composition notebook with graph paper instead of lined paper. I put stickers on the front, like they did. And I cut up some of my playbills from the plays we went to see this past spring and glued pieces of them on the covers. It now looks like something that could house mash notes from 7th grade. I carry it everywhere, like a secret friend. I even took it to asthma camp. This is what I want to do this summer with my notebook. I want to draw ridiculous pictures of Purple and Brown and space aliens and birds. I want to make lists of favorite sea creatures, and bad rhyming couplets, and squiggles that I pretend are great stories. I want to have fun.