Now We Are Pooh

I’m the only one still left awake in the house, I think—well, T might still be up talking to one of her diocesan friends on the cell phone, but she’s completely at the other end of the house with her door closed.  L had five hours’ sleep in the last two nights as she dashed to get the costumes done for St. Andrew’s HS Drama Department production of The Secret Garden.  Tonight is opening night, so everything had to do or be given up on forever.  She crashed out as soon as she had read M her bedtime Pooh story, and M crashed right there with her.

M has become a real freak for A. A. Milne; the books she always demands for her bedtime reading are When We Were Very Young and Now We Are Six, known respectively as “pink poetry” and “green poetry,” for the colors of their dust jackets.  She gets half a volume (about 50 pages of shortish verses) as bedtime reading—or she does until the nights that I, who generally end up doing the reading, rebel from a surfeit of light verse and insist on reading a chapter from one of the Pooh books.  M usually agrees to this without a fuss if I tell her I’m “tired of <color> poetry” and want to read Pooh instead.  Nights that we do read from the verse books, if she wants a particular one she’ll ask for a title of one of them.  Her current favorites are “The Engineer” in Now We Are Six and “Rice Pudding” in When We Were Very Young.  My favorites are “The King’s Breakfast” and “Disobedience” from WWWVY, and “The Knight Whose Armour Didn’t Squeak” and “The Emperor’s Rhyme” from NWAS.  Pooh nights generally draw a request for something with “the Forest” or perhaps Piglet in it.  She doesn’t care for Owl, for some reason, I don’t know why.  Owl is just about my favorite character.

I was intending to write about my training classes tonight, but I have to go to the supermarket before I go to bed and it’s almost eleven already, so that will have to wait for another night.

A dead furry harvests the white pay phone.  Fnord.