It's it, Mommy

I tutor/teach English at a local homeschool co-op on Mondays. Today my seven-year-old son was a little sick, so he sat in my classroom instead of going to the play room with the other younger siblings. He hunkered down in a chair near where I stood with his nose buried in my iPhone, probably playing Angry Birds Star Wars.

So, I taught the fifth- and sixth-grade girls about nouns and pronouns, then I gave them a sample sentence:

Molly rode the horse.

Then I had students plug in pronouns to replace the nouns. They figured out "she" for the subject, but trying to decide on a pronoun for the direct object "horse" stumped them. One called out "him." I explained that we don't know the gender of the horse, and the horse is not being personified (like in a story with talking animals). I asked again, but nobody answered. Then I glanced down and realized my son had scurried around the podium and was patting my leg.

"Mommy, it's 'it'!" he said in a loud whisper and flashed me a huge smile.

I love that little boy. Being a parent is the most difficult job I've ever had, but I wouldn't give up that boy or his sister for anything.

Shooting Star

I just stepped out of Starbucks, looked up at the twilight sky, and watched a meteor streak from the deep blue canopy of sky above toward the still-warm horizon and vanish. Larger and brighter than any other stars or planets in our night sky, it lasted barely long enough for me to hold my breath. Beautiful.

Royal Flush

A  friend recently posted on Facebook that his daughter's fish had died. She wanted to bury it at the beach, but since they don't live there, he was contemplating whether temporary storage in their freezer might be a solution.

This reminded me of college. My roommate/best friend and I had an aquarium where we kept black mollies and red swordtails. When fish died, she and I held flushing funerals—the dorm equivalent to a burial at sea.

Photo by Richard Chambers, 

available under the Creative Commons 

Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license.

At this time, we lived in an all girls dorm, but our floor had urinals in the bathrooms as well. We always took the newly deceased to a toilet stall, flushed, and gave a sad impression and a farewell to the fish as it swirled around the bowl and made it's final flourish of an exit to the watery abyss beyond the porcelain.

Then one day our male swordtail died, so we decided to be gender correct and use one of the urinals. We emptied our net of the remains, said our peace, and then pulled the silver handle. We expected a long goodbye like our previous experiences with the ladies' bowl, but that fish departed with a liquid equivalent of the Chernobyl blast. A sudden, giant WHOOSH erupted, not unlike the force of an industrial strength pressure washer, and that fish was gone. I mean vanished. We jumped back from the urinal both in shock and to avoid the after-spray of water and scales. We'd been robbed of our peaceful goodbye and startled out of our wits, and as a result we committed the ultimate funeral faux pas--we laughed.

Moral of this story? When in doubt, flush first.