Cul de Sac

From Lynne Murphy on Facebook, this Cul de Sac cartoon, which reminded her of her daughter Grover:

The child in the cartoon, Alice, is 4; she’s at the stage of bargaining about the exact choice of words.

Parent and kid

(Not about language.)

Assembling a Christmas present for my grand-daughter, I’ve been unearthing and scanning in photos of her Zwicky grandmother. Like my Rice grandfather before me, Ann Daingerfield Zwicky died about 20 years before Opal was born, and Opal’s become curious about this person who was so important in her mother’s life and mine (small voice: “Tell me about my grandmother”). But in this case, there’s photographic evidence — and a great many stories, some of which I’ve been telling here. (There are no photographs of my grandfather Rice, and a very few stories, only via my grandmother, whose husband died when she was in her early 20s; she herself died 50 years ago.)

The Big Seven

From The Jack Wrangler Story (by Jack Wrangler and Carl Johnes, 1984), p. 30:

… I hadn’t figured all that [that his father was a perfectionist, an achiever, and a pessimist, and had judged his son to be doomed to failure] out by my seventh birthday. I just knew I felt a new sense of uneasiness. The Big Seven. Seven is that point in life where precocious children start writing sonatas, creative children do murals in the bathroom, tough children hit the hard stuff, and healthy, normal children receive birthday cards showing a brown teddy bear holding up a big orange 7. But if you’re growing up in Tinsel Country [L.A.] and your father is  a motion picture producer and your mother is glamorous and you have two gorgeous older sisters and you’re skinny and your ears are too big and your hair is so blond and short that you look bald–well, then seven is the time when the heavy insecurities set in permanently.