Another One for the Books

I have a Facebook page. When you are on Facebook, you see all the quizzes, name assignments, and other folderol that one's friends play. Some of my friends are more game to play (so to speak) than others; all the same, sooner or later, they will surely run out of names, colors, movie stars, and 20th century decades that they resemble the most.

But every now and then one crops up that makes me smile. Frances came up with a winner earlier this week.

Monday morning, Frances's status read: "She still says nothing, just stands with her back to me, pouring two mugs of coffee."

My mind started puzzling over her comment. It was written late the night before. Did she have a fight with her mother? One of her sisters? Then I read the comment Frances had posted underneath:

Grab the book nearest you. Right now.
* Turn to page 56.
* Find the fifth sentence.
* Post that sentence AS YOUR STATUS. AND POST these instructions in a comment to this status.
* Don't dig for your favorite book, the coolest, the most intellectual. Use the CLOSEST book...

For a book junkie like me, that was like laying out a pharmacopoeia of controlled substances and saying "Take your pick, April. Have seconds!"

I held off until Tuesday before I succumbed. I picked up the nearest book, turned to page 56, counted to five, then posted: "You knew, you knew that was going to happen and you didn't say a word."

The source? The Time Traveler's Wife, which was sitting on my desk because I just finished rereading it Monday night.

The rules of engagement intrigue me. The "closest" book? For those of us who read a lot of books all the time, that makes for some rather interesting choices. Sometimes they are all "closest," especially if I am at my desk in the first floor study. For those of us who frequently go back to old favorites when we are in between "new" reads, the possibilities become even more quixotic. And for those of us who frequently return to what may be deemed "children's fiction," well, the challenge becomes irresistible. (You know what I am writing about because chances are you do the same thing. Why is it that we have all read the entire Harry Potter series countless times? Good writing, for one thing, but also for the sheer comfort of worrying about Voldemort rather than the latest unemployment figures.)

Using the core of the idea, I have designed a two-part challenge. I went and pulled 15 children's novels (children's literature, youth fiction, call it what you will), not entirely at random, and wrote down the fifth sentence on page 56 from each one. If there was no fifth sentence due to a chapter ending, I wrote down the last sentence. If the sentence was part of a quote in the original, I put quotations around it to keep it in context. The sentences are:

"I've scattered largesse."

"You deserve a reward."

But the owl laid motionless and pathetic as a toy on the floor of her cage.

"You can share the ribbon."

"There must be some other way to - " began Milo.

"But I suppose it is all humbug, like so many other patented articles."

Ginger rubbed herself against my legs.

All light was gone.

"You don't have to spin a web."

I stuck a few ferns in them so they would look as if they were growing there, and then ran back to camp, breathless.

John and Barbara gurgled from their perambulator.

"They're going to finally let you out of here!"

"Where?"

It was all right, then, to lick the maple syrup from your fingers.

With a gun and a knife and some matches.

Have you figured them out? Do you know where they came from? You know a few of them, surely. (The answers are at the end of the post.)

The second part of the challenge is to take the random sentences and assemble them into a narrative. (You may dispense with the quotation marks as you need to for this part of the challenge.) The result, depending on your sentences, can be very avant-garde. Here is mine:

I've scattered largesse. All light was gone.

"They're going to finally let you out of here!" John and Barbara gurgled from their perambulator. "Where?"

"There must be some other way to - " began Milo. With a gun and a knife and some matches. But the owl laid motionless and pathetic as a toy on the floor of her cage.

"You can share the ribbon." Ginger rubbed herself against my legs. "You deserve a reward."

It was all right, then, to lick the maple syrup from your fingers. But I suppose it is all humbug, like so many other patented articles. I stuck a few ferns in them so they would look as if they were growing there, and then ran back to camp, breathless. You don't have to spin a web.

I suppose for some people this is too geeky, but as I have previously established, my geek credentials are the gold standard. And if you are like I was when I read the Facebook post, you are already reaching for the closest book.

Go ahead. Page 56 is waiting for you.

Answers in order of quote: The Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett; These Happy Golden Years by Laura Ingalls Wilder; Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by J. K. Rowling; Ramona the Pest by Beverly Cleary; The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster; Ozma of Oz by L. Frank Baum; The View from Saturday by E. L. Konigsburg; A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle; Charlotte's Web by E. B. White; My Side of the Mountain by Jean Craighead George; Mary Poppins by P. L. Travers; Holes by Louis Sacher; All-of-a-Kind Family by Sydney Taylor; Tuck Everlasting by Natalie Babbitt; Hatchet by Gary Paulsen.

Queen of the Geeks

Many years ago, the young next door neighbor was in my living room, despairing over finishing her social studies homework. To demonstrate the impossibility of the assignment, she read off a question. I answered it. She read off another. I answered that too. (Keep in mind this was a 13 year old quizzing a thirty-something history major.) After I answered the third question, Bethany looked at me with insight dawning on her face.

"April, you are the queen of the geeks!"

At about the same time, I was reading a fascinating book about American bridge builders. One afternoon, I stopped by a friend's house. Her husband, a civil engineer who was a bridge designer, was there and I started talking excitedly about this book. Jim stared at me, then said slowly "April, I work with some really geeky people and even they wouldn't read that book."

(The book, if you are wondering, was Engineers of Dreams: Great Bridge Builders and the Spanning of America by Henry Petroski. Great reading.)

Okay, so maybe I was way up there in the Kingdom of Geek.

Being geeky is not necessarily synonymous with being highly intelligent, although I like to think of myself as reasonably bright. Highly intelligent is being great at calculus. (I was good but not great at it.) Being geeky is being enthralled with the mathematical proof through calculus of the circumference of a circle. Highly intelligent is doing really, really well on your SATs. (I did okay.) Being geeky is remembering the definition of "halcyon" from the SAT study guide 35 years later.

("Halcyon" means calm, peaceful, and tranquil for SAT purposes.)

Highly intelligent is knowing and applying the rules of evidence in a trial if you are a lawyer, as I was. (I was never confident about my grasp of the rules of evidence.) Being geeky is being able to answer a judge's question ("what's the name of Barney Google's horse?") while opposing counsel was still trying to make sense of the question.

(Barney Google's horse, incidentally, was named "Spark Plug.")

Geekiness is genetic and cannot be taught. You either are or are not a geek. I got it from my mom's family, the Skatzes. I had two uncles who were fonts of quirky, irrelevant trivia and my beloved Grandmother Skatzes had an amazing store of off the wall facts that would bubble out from time to time. Some of my cousins inherited the trait as well, especially my cousin Brent.

I'm proud to note that my older son Ben inherited the G gene, as it is known. Like his mother before him, he played on the high school In the Know team, an academic quiz team. (Unlike me, as Ben is also highly intelligent, he played varsity team all four years, compared to my one.) Geek that I was, I would attend the matches (not geeky) and sit there whispering the answers under my breath (geeky).

(An interesting but not geeky side note. In the team photo above, circa 1974, I am on the far left swapping a joke with future local lawyer Keith, a Deadhead with a high geek quota himself. My future brother-in-law Brian, not a geek except in the musical sense, anchors the far right.)

Ben ended his final match of his senior year in true geek form. His team went down in flames at the state playoff and were eliminated by noon. For me, it was a bittersweet moment, watching his last competition. We walked out to the car, quietly, then Ben said "well, we went out not with a bang, but a whimper."

T. S. Eliot in the parking lot! (The ending of "The Hollow Men.") My beamish boy!

We chortled in our joy all the way home.