Pete brought home a flyer a couple of weeks ago about an author visiting the school. We could buy her book, an inspirational rhyming book, for only $20. And! It came with an accessory -- a very girly accessory. Call it a pink hair ribbon.
"Please can we buy a signed copy, Mom?" Pete implored, his gray eyes earnest. "My teacher says it's a really good book."
I said, "Oh, honey, I don't think so. 'Inspirational' is one strike and 'rhyming' is two strikes and the presence of not one but two dangling modifiers in the author's bio makes three. And what would you do with a pink hair ribbon anyway?"
"But Mom," he said, disappointed, "my teacher says it's a really good book and she knows about good books."
At this point I wondered if the school got a slice of the proceeds, because really? Twenty bucks for a children's book (with hair ribbon)? I kept my cynicism to myself. I said, "We should choose our books carefully because we don't have a lot of shelf space. We can get it from the library and see if we really want to own it."
I felt a little dissatisfied with myself after the conversation. It sounds arrogant, refusing to buy a book based on a hunch that its scansion will be suboptimal. Was this a Charlotte Mason No Twaddle kind of proclamation, or just a surfeit of intellectual pride? For better or for worse, I have decided that life is too short to read terrible books to my children. This means I will never again read anything written by Stan and Jan Berenstain (or at least nothing from the past 35 years -- Spooky Old Tree gets a pass). I guess it also means that sometimes I say no to my favorite pair of earnest gray eyes.
A couple of days ago I came home to find a worried neighborhood grandma on the front porch. Joe had seen the pink hair ribbon in her grandson's backpack. "Dude," he said, "why do you have a pink hair ribbon?" In his version of the story, the kid said, "I don't know. You want it?" Joe took it from him and looked it over, but quickly realized he had no need for a pink hair ribbon. He turned to a classmate. "Want a pink hair ribbon?" he asked. The classmate took it and Joe thought no more about it.
In the grandson's version of the story, he said, "You can look at it if you want to, but you'll have to give it back to me because my grandma bought it as a gift for someone else." In the grandson's version of the story, he had been very clear about the importance of the pink hair ribbon. I admit to a certain curiosity about the story the grandson might tell without an irate grandma standing by, but in the moment we had reached an impasse. I said I'd call the other kid's parents. I said I hoped the ribbon could be recovered.
I wound up leaving a message in an anonymous voice mailbox, which was not encouraging. I imagined the grandma telling me that Joe should chip in for the lost book/ribbon set.
I thought it would be the height of irony if I wound up buying (part of) the book I had so loftily declined to pay for a few weeks earlier.
I was relieved when the ribbon turned up. I'm still thinking about intellectual snobbery and children's books. I still can't deal with rhyming books that don't scan.
What books do you hate to read your kids? And will you read them if asked nicely? Will you buy a book you hate? What about a book you only suspect you will hate?
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