What is in a Name?

Sunday, March 26, 2006

[6:38am] At the fort, OLeif and Collette perused the cases of artifacts in the small museum. And Collette found two awesome pewter soup spoons under Plexiglas which she thought would be perfect for OLeif, as none of her soup spoons at home were big enough for him.

The coffee house was crowded as usual. And those attending included OLeif, Collette, Magnus, Augustus, Rose (wearing her usual red shoes), Molly, and surprisingly, Bob Buckle. Joseph was serving. And Joe was at a Blues hockey game with the Hobcoggin family and saw a good fight break out, apparently. Ben-Hur opted not to attend, seeing as he had homework to finish.

There, Magnus sketched cartoon rooms while Augustus made faces upon command from Magnus. Bob ordered “the best cup of hot chocolate [he had] ever had,” with “a hint of cinnamon in it.” And Magnus spontaneously ‘oooohed’ to the music of the band. It made Collette wonder why when she was in high school, their philosophy group had never taken part in such hang-outs. And then she remembered that the coffee house had not been invented yet.

On the way back, after dropping off Bob and Rose, Molly talked on things such as OLeif’s passion for food.

“Yeah – OLeif is this, big sleepy, bear, who, likes honey, and his food.”

And she commented on how people sometimes explained death away to their children by saying something like, “Oh, they become stars in the sky, twinkling down at you.”

“It’s a, ball of gas and fire. It’s not your grandma shut up!”

Sunday was a trifle more eventful. Cherry Pie fainted in a seizure in the front row while her dad was about to lead prayer. He quickly excused himself and ran down from the platform. It took a good minute before anyone knew what had happened, until several of the registered nurses in the congregation hurried over and Cherry’s dad carried her out of the sanctuary after looking to Sinai for him to take over the prayer. She was fine in the end, according to the report.

And then, as rumor had it, Wallace was offered a job as an assistant lab chemist through So Rum following the service, and even Mt. Sinai got in on the discussion towards the end as they were shutting things down.

Then it was to Simple Simon’s for Jimmy, Jeremiah Toast, OLeif, Collette, Joe, Ben-Hur, Augustus, and Bob. This was where Bob asked various questions such as:

“What do you think would happen if it started raining Mormons?”

And while they ate pizza, Collette watched a little girl dressed as a gymnast with a gold medal around her neck, show her mom a card of Russian currency.

Before 3:30 rolled around for youth, Joe headed over to the Hobcoggins for a bike ride with Wally and OLeif, Collette, Ben-Hur, Augustus, and Bob drove over to the Buckle’s. Collette opted to enjoy the weather by reading in the car with the windows rolled down. And from her position she could hear the banging and crashing as the boys experimented on Bob’s drum set in the den.

Youth consisted primarily of waiting for the girls from the Bible study while the boys looked over all the preschool story books in a box in the couch room, laughing over the pickle cars in Richard Scarry.

“Look, the pickle car keeps running into other cars,” OLeif laughed.

“How much damage could a pickle cause?” Judah chuckled, who was rather giddy lately.

“Well, apparently a lot,” OLeif showed him the picture, “at least to this mouse here in his car.”

“Well what’s the mouse driving? A marshmallow?”

And it went downhill from there after Jimmy announced to everyone that they had to come up with a name for the youth building, or Sinai would select a name. As this was a highly unsatisfactory idea, the kids were eager to jump on the opportunity. And so Atticus worked at wrapping copper around stained glass pieces for his window while the circle discussed various ridiculous possibilities and Collette shook her head and laughed and Samantha chewed her gum and expressed an occasional protest to various suggestions, watching the crowd under orange eye-shadowed lids and passing around chocolate cookies which she had brought to share.

“‘Jimmy’s Magical Kingdom!’” OLeif called out – and with that as the first suggestion, the arguing took off.

“Ahhhh ho!” Magnus exclaimed, with one arm tucked under the other, covering his mouth to half-stifle the laugh.

“No, no way,” Susie jumped on him quickly. “We are not naming it ‘Jimmy’s Magical Kingdom’. We have to come up with something more serious.”

“But it’s so amazing!” Magnus insisted.

“I’m telling you guys, we should call it ‘The Zone’,” Rose said, almost sarcastically.

“Too generic,” Ben-Hur said. “Something in a foreign language. Magnus, give us some Latin.”

“‘Semper Reformandum’?”

“Yeah… Or maybe Swahili. Judah, what do you know?”

Judah gave out some phrases which were hardly pronounceable. And then he had to leave to attend to Evangeline.

“Come on, guys, ‘Jimmy’s Magical Kingdom’ – it’s so cool.”

‘With like, pink searchlights on the top of the building,” OLeif added, laughing with Judah.

“Guys, it sounds so bad,” Ben-Hur bent over in laughter, tipping his chair from one side to the other.

“No, no, no. Magnus, we have to be serious here,” Susie was not impressed, although she was laughing. “We have to remember that they’re going to put the sign out on the front with the name on it.”

“Yeah, what would we do in an emergency?”

“What if the place caught on fire?”

“Yeah,” Susie continued, holding her hand up as a pretend phone. “We’d be like, ‘Help! ‘Jimmy’s Magical…” And she couldn’t finish from laughing.

“She can’t finish it,” OLeif laughed, “They get here and the animatronic giant Jimmy outside is falling over in flames.”

“How about… ‘Shoes’?” Augustus said.

“‘Shoes’?”

“‘Box’.”

“Yeah, like we’re the shoes and we go inside the box,” Magnus said.

“How about ‘The Thicket’?” Atticus suggested, smoothing the copper around the glass piece.

“Drop all the ‘the’s’,” Ben-Hur insisted. “No articles.”

“I like it,” Molly said.

“Well, let’s look through the Bible and get some ideas,” Jimmy said, handing out all of their Bibles randomly to whomever would look.

“Guys? ‘Jimmy’s Magical Kingdom’?” Magnus beckoned again.

“No, that’s stupid!” Bob said for the seventh time.

“How about ‘Pentecost’?” Rose said, flipping randomly.

“This place used to be a tractor garage,” Jimmy started.

“We could just called it ‘The Garage’.”

“No, no ‘the’s,” Ben-Hur said again, looking up Greek words on OLeif’s phone.

“What about Melchizedek’s Garage?” Susie said.

Everyone laughed.

“Or ‘Substitutionary Sacrifices’,” Rose suggested, still looking through the Bible.

“That’s great – she’s just pulling every word out of there that’s more than four syllables long,” August chuckled, who clearly did not care what they decided to name the building.

And that was pretty much the rest of the afternoon.