We here at the Family Valued monochromatic bathhouse, mobile restaurant, and misinformed press room have randomly selected a ten-year-old from among the one immediately available.

When I was a youth, we had something called Classics Illustrated — comic versions of great literary works.
Yeah. Graphic Classics are these books of really good stories by really good writers and they’re excerpts and they’re cool. I’ve read two of them and I have one here from the library. I had never actually read some of these authors’ stuff, so now I like them. I already liked H.G. Wells because I’ve seen the movie War of the Worlds — the old one. There’s this one where they exorcised this old mummy’s spirit and it’s really cool. The Hound of the Baskervilles had this big dog and it attacked people.

When I was your age, we heard tell that people would read the comic versions instead of the originals of some of these books.
The originals actually have more flavors to them and more feeling. You can imagine them a lot better that way.

But you like the Graphic Classics?
Because they have good stories. Now I like Bram Stoker a lot. For the Lair of the White Worm mostly just because it was so awesome. It was about this worm/snake monster and it ate people.

There seem to be a lot of large monsters consuming people.
Maybe people are just scared of those things. But I like being scared. I’m a big fan of horror and science fiction. I really want to get the other Graphic Classics, like Adventure Classics and Horror Classics and Mark Twain and Robert Louis Stevenson. I really want to get a lot of them.

April, 2006

Say what you will for finances and household chores, but nothing challenges newlyweds quite like holiday celebrations. Traditions have to be meshed. Other people’s feelings need to be considered. Family members whom you did not marry need to be given their due regard. And people never make you talk about it before the wedding, like they will about children and religion and doing the laundry. Sure, it may come up if you’re doing the mixed faith thing, but the sparkle in your eyes is too bright for you to focus on such minutiae. And then you’re blessed with children and matters only get more complicated as you seek ways to pass along your important traditions without running hog-wild over your spouse’s history.

This is what I was thinking about while our family chopped down our Christmas tree.

I was a teen-ager before I visited a cut-your-own farm, at the behest of my brother who had been seeking a way to meld his ideas of the holidays with his wife’s. Somehow I fit into the plan, probably as convenient labor.

Off and on over a decade of living in Rochester we have patronized the same farm out Route 104 where the houses spread out and the industrial buildings sprout like mushrooms. For the first time in a long time, our entire family was in attendance. Maybe it’s not a “tradition,” but I liked watching each of us take our turn at the saw. And I loved tossing the tree into the car, turning, and being engulfed in a different sort of tradition: the family snowball fight.

December, 2005

The animal kingdom’s greatest spy stars in a series of kids books

We here at the Family Valued detective agency, cricket nursery, and school for Humphrey Bogart impressions have randomly selected an 11-year-old from among the one immediately available.

Talk to me about Chet Gecko.

Chet Gecko is a private eye in different mysteries about elementary school animals. Chet Gecko has his own private eye agency and his assistant is Natalie, a mockingbird. He solves mysteries for people, like my-sister’s-gone-missing-can-you-do-something-about-it?

The Malted Falcon was really cool because I’ve seen the movie The Maltese Falcon. The book was really cool because they used some of my favorite Chet Gecko characters plus some of my favorite characters from the movie. In it, Chet Gecko tries to get the Malted Falcon, this ultimate falcon made out of candy. There are others who are after it also, so he has to try and get it before the others do. It was cool!

I’m currently reading Key Lardo. It’s about these two sisters who are birds. There’s this penguin who’s really fat and he’s a detective from England. His name is James Bland, which is really funny.

These are animals that live in an elementary school?

The animals are personified like they’re actual people except they’re animals. They’re kind of like those cat spy books, but he isn’t a spy and he isn’t a cat. He’s a gecko.

You’ve been reading this series for a long time.

Yeah, because the books take a long time to come out. It just seems like a long time.

Who would like these books?

Anybody who knows what a classic mystery is and knows what school is like. They are very funny, but Chet Gecko and Natalie make terrible jokes.

January, 2006