Statistics, Keys, & Omelettes

Friday, August 17, 2007


At the house, tutoring was again in order.

This time, Rose was in the process of cleaning and organizing Dad’s office. The wooden table with the white top and the six wooden swivel chairs with dark turquoise plastic cushions sat in the middle of the room. They had once been the kitchen set in Dad’s house when he was growing up. Rose had cleared off the aviation training materials, mathematics VHS tapes, and various other technological equipment, which left room for study.

“Come on, Rose, let’s get to it.”

Collette set the textbooks on the table.

“Just a minute.”

Rose, dressed in lounge pants, oversized t-shirt, blue knit cap, and glasses, was removing the blanket of dust from all of the book shelves with cheap glass cleaner and paper towels.

“Well, it works,” she insisted.

Finally, Rose took a seat on one of the swivel chairs, but not before she had found an old plastic box full of keys, an ancient glass bottle of glitter, two lapel buttons with cryptic letters written across the fronts, and other miscellaneous items. She began to polish the keys, ranging in age from (perhaps late eighteen hundreds) to the 1970’s. Two peculiarly shaped keys were labeled: Starflite.

“I think they’re for airplanes,” Rose said, after googling the name. “I’ll make a necklace out of one of them. Better ask Dad first.”

Then Rose tried, at first unsuccessfully, to turn her attention to correlational statistics, z-scores, and normal distribution graphs.

Upstairs, Grandma Combs had arrived to ride with Carrie-Bri to an autism and Asperger’s syndrome luncheon hosted by a St. Louis radio announcer in Chesterfield. She brought a box of freshly-baked zucchini muffins (something vegetarian-for-three-months-so-far-Carrie could eat) and two gray newsboy caps, one for Carrie and one for Rose. And Grandma cooed at Puck for awhile, who grinned and curled his toes around Carrie’s arm.

“Look!”

Linnea showed Collette her arm. A large purple “W” had been written on her upper arm with marker, inside a pink box.

“Amelia and I made Webkins tattoos.”

For lunch, Collette had promised Francis an omelette, which he asked for her to make on a regular basis. This time, with baked beans on the side. It seemed like either a British breakfast or something the cowboys might have eaten out on the range. The beans did that.

Before leaving, Collette took some photos and an old album of Dad-and-Mom pictures from the late 70’s and early 80’s for OLeif to scan and convert to black and white photos for the walls. These included their time spent in Arizona with the cacti and grapefruit trees, their little white house in Iowa when Dad had worked for Rockwell fresh out of college, and some of the little planes that Dad had flown after obtaining his pilot’s license.

“Love stinks,
And dies!”
– alleged lyrics sung by Ewan McGregor to the pianoforte in “Emma”, likely only misheard by both Collette and Carrie-Bri, simultaneously

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Jamie Larson
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