Our little homeschooling group was planning to make a banner. The parish school kids were walking in solemn procession to mark the Year of the Eucharist and we were going to join them. I was worried about this, since my Joe doesn't do solemn and I pretty much hate felt banners. But I was game.
The moms meet to plan the banner. "I know!" I say. "A pelican! With chicks!"
Blank stares all around, as if I had said, "I know! Yogi Bear! With cubs!"
I explain. And then I imagine pelican chicks, not the most attractive representatives of their genus to begin with, rendered in felt. By small children. Perhaps Yogi Bear was a better idea. Is he a Eucharistic symbol?
Plan B: a beach scene. A pelican on the beach, unobtrusively symbolizing the Eucharist with no creepy-looking naked chicks nearby. Four figures in silhouette (Jesus, Peter, James, John). Each kid makes a fish and glues it onto the water. The moms glue an onion bag atop the fish for a net. Matthew 4:19 will go somewhere in puffy paint. This can work, we say.
I go home and tell the boys. The oldest says, "I'm not making any dumb fish. Unless I can make a giant squid. How about that?"
I think for a minute. Is this creativity? Is this a reasonable reaction to an activity I would have hated as a kid? Or is this pain-in-the-butt-ness that ought to be squelched? I am torn. My husband is not.
"You can't make a squid if you're supposed to make a fish," he says with finality. "That's not even the right phylum."
"Okay, then," says Alex. "How about an alien sea fungus?"
Elwood rolls his eyes. "That's not even the right kingdom!"
We talk taxonomy for a few minutes. Where do sharks and bony fish diverge -- class? order? Alex allows as to how he might be willing to make a sawfish. It can only be three inches long, I warn him, imagining him painstakingly cutting out each tiny projection until he crumples the whole thing in frustration. This is a dumb idea, he says again.
The next day we go to the craft store to buy puffy paint. He wants to know why, if rocks and trees can praise the Lord, giant squid are excluded. "Giant squid can praise the Lord, honey," I said, thinking to myself that this is a sentence I never expected to utter. "We're making fin fish, though." We talk about the ICHTHYS acronym, and about being made in the image of God. I consider a Divine Cephalopod. Hmph, says my firstborn.
At home he tries again. If God made squid, he declared them good, right? They were considered clean, right? (This is what you get when you read your kid Leviticus in kindergarten.) No! I say, running for the computer. I don't think so. Sure enough, fish have to have fins and scales to be kosher.
"But!" he says, his face lighting up, "That doesn't matter to us because of the New Covenant! Of course I can be a giant squid!"
We end up missing the banner-making get-together because no one else wants to share the mucus. The solemn procession proceeds sans Gladly-fish because our car is in the shop and I don't want to walk all the way in the cold with a sick baby. But Alex isn't done thinking about giant squid.
Tonight at dinner he says, "I bet the fishermen in the Sea of Galilee caught squid in their nets, didn't they? Fisherman is technically a dimunitive term."
I don't know what "dimunitive" is supposed to mean but he says it with such earnestness that I have to nod my head thoughtfully in response. I think he's heading for law school. I may be heading for a facility with padded walls. At least I'll be laughing most of the way there.
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