Tom’s birthday continued till Saturday and we had a big barbeque with a bunch of great friends. Birthday + party = cupcakes. Right??
This year, we got all fancy with our party and actually hung decorations!
We love having a barbeque at this time of year, not just to celebrate our hope for Tom getting wiser, but to give our friends a chance to see Tom’s parents. They usually fly in from Adelaide some time around the end of May. It’s a nice time for a visit because the school year is wrapping up and there are such great events – picnics and open house and dinners in the park.
I absolutely love this time of year. I still get the same old thrill when I realize that summer vacation is close enough to touch. Just thinking about the last day of school brings a wash of memories to my mind – the hum of lawn mowers and the tick tick ticktickticktick of sprinklers, the smell of rain on warm pavement and the prickle of grass under bare feet. Summer was always such a broad, slow smile. I hope our kids will have the same feeling about it as they grow up.
After our barbeque on Saturday, we all trucked up to the Book Passage in Corte Madera, where our dear friend Lissa Rovetch was having a book signing with her mother, Gerda. They just teamed up to create a wonderful book titled
There Was a Man Who Loved a Rat
And Other Vile Little Poems
Hard to beat a title like that. They gave an inspiring and entertaining presentation that no one wanted to end. Here they are:
Aren’t they stunning? You should have seen them – smart, funny and gorgeous. (And check out how Lissa’s dress matches the circle on the cover of their book. She’s brilliant and coordinated.)
So it worked like this – Gerda wrote all the vile little poems, and Lissa did the vile little drawings. The result is far from dull. Here’s one of my favorites:
There was a cunning little mobster
who kept a large and lively lobster.
He aimed the beast at people’s ears,
and some remembered it for years.
Gerda was a treasure chest of stories – rare and glimmering and abundant. From her family’s narrow escape from Germany under Nazi persecution, to her years as a draftsman during the war (she mentioned in an aside that “trigonometry is really nothing to sneeze at – it comes in very handy when you’re called to do war work”) to meeting her husband when she was a potter at Oxford and he was there on a Fulbright – every story had the entire room laughing and in awe. Lissa is an incredible story teller as well, and it was a treat to hear them play off of each other. What a gift.