A Waste of Good Resources - Orange Juice, Imitation Cocoa Puffs, & Toilet Paper
Tuesday, February 7, 2006
On the way to the house that morning, OLeif and Collette listened to more Puritan Prayers. Collette had brought an orange and before OLeif had gotten into the car, she wrote in pen on its bright peel: ‘Eat me’ along with a smiling google-eyed face.
“Do you have something I can put the peels in?” OLeif asked as he began to dig in.
Collette looked through the batch of old papers in the pouch on her door and found an abandoned plastic wrapping from some piece of mail. She rolled down the sides until it made a sturdier pouch and set it in his lap. And for the next seven minutes the prayers of the Puritans played in harmony with the slurps and squishings of OLeif’s orange.
“Here,” he handed her the bag of peels seven minutes later, “I finished it all.”
“You did indeed,” Collette reached over to point out several dribbles of orange juice on the steering wheel.
OLeif smoothed out one of the puddles with his finger and stuck the fingertip of juice back in his mouth. Collette made a face.
“Not like you didn’t hear me eating it the whole time,” he grinned. “An element of sschqulurpgooshsquarshnish…. How gross is that?”
Collette was greeted at the door that morning by Rose, who was wearing a stylish pair of shades. Mom was in the kitchen toasting bagels with cream cheese for breakfast.
After the bagels and devotions, Frances cleaned up his cereal spill and threw the dish rag across the kitchen, aiming for the sink, just missing Mom, emitting imitation Cocoa-Puffs from the folds as it flew through the air. As restitution for the consequential mess, Mom had him wipe down the entire kitchen table.
After breakfast, Collette aided Linnea in practicing her new piano piece, “Dragon’s Lair,” while instructing Joe and Rose through a sociology chapter of population and urbanization. This, while Carrie studied meteorology for her new February class and wrote an essay on events of tornadoes and hurricanes picking up ‘small crabs, fish, stones, and assorted vegetation… schools of fish or nests of vermin,’ occasionally depositing them some time later in landlocked villages. Later, Collette read the Psalms and Quo Vadis, a favorite (although graphic) book of hers. And Joe and Rose were invited to an evening of games and snacks for Annamaria’s 16th birthday that Sunday evening, one day early. Such went the Tuesday.
“Guys, we are killing the rain forest with the huge amount of toilet paper we are wasting in this house!” Carrie announced later in a condemning tone, stomping through the living room in her bare feet, after just having exited the bathroom.
At lunch, Rose was told yet once again by Mom:
“Rose, you march to the beat of a different drummer.”
Came the silly reply: “That’s because your drum is stupid.”
Laugh, laugh, laugh…
Shortly later, Joe hurried Rose out the door to choir.
“Bye! We love you all,” he called back to the rest of the house.
Later while Mom took a nap, Collette and Carrie struck up negotiations:
“Frances,” Collette whispered to him, “go ask Carrie to make some chocolate chip cookies.”
Frances asked, and returned as Collette entered the living room where Carrie was reading, lounging on the couch.
“I’ll make chocolate chip cookies if you go get Hamlet,” Carrie said.
“Don’t have a car,” Collette said.
“Oh, come on, you can drive the big green slug.”
Collette decided that was highly improbable, considering she had not driven the slug in a good while and tossed Frances the bag of chocolate chips. He caught it, tossing it back.
“Take it into the kitchen, Frances,” Collette tossed it back and he caught it again, throwing it back.
“It’s going to bust, Frances; take it back,” Collette sent it through the air again.
Frances tossed it back.
“Come on, Frances,” Collette urged him, throwing it back again.
This time, Frances got the bag of chocolate chips where it hurts (unintentionally). He dropped to the floor, giggling. Similar to Carrie-Bri, Frances never cried, but giggled, when he was slapped, hit, or punched. An odd sort of thing.
“Oh, grow up,” Carrie rolled her eyes.
And so Collette went off to read Scene 1 of Hamlet with Linnea, who rather remarkably used proper inflections of the voice at times for her characters, though hardly knowing the plot. And Mom taught Frances and Rose the old saying, “In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue,” or as Joe always said:
“In 1993 Columbus sailed the ocean sea,”
…which actually was more accurate, considering the king and queen of Spain dubbed him admiral of the ocean sea, not admiral of the ocean blue.
“Her husband’s moral vision was not penetrating, his soul did not glow with a single ray of eternal light. She could not even bring up her son in the spirit of truth. And when she reflected that this condition of things might be prolonged to the end of her life, and that then might come a moment of separation, a hundred times more terrible than that temporary one over which they were lamenting, she could not imagine herself happy without them even in heaven. And she had already spent many sleepless night in tears and prayers, imploring pardon and mercy. But she brought her sufferings to God; she waited and hoped. Even now, when a new blow struck her, when the command of the tyrant took from her a dear one, whom Aulus called the light of their eyes, Pomponia still hoped, believing that there was a power above Nero’s, and a mercy greater than his wrath.”
– Quo Vadis, 3rd paragraph p.38, 1897 (Collette’s and Rose’s book collection)