Jonah and the Giants
The libros en español section at Wal-Mart in Visalia is smaller than the same section at Borders in Santa Fe, but the odd thing about the Borders in Santa Fe, is that you can't find anyone speaking Spanish in the store, and other than myself, in the half-dozen-plus visits that Sam (dino lit reviewer) and Jonah (DVDs and chocolate cookie reviewer) and Gracie (waiting-for-Potter alternatives reviewer) and Kezzie (picture book and pre-literary Potter ephemera reviewer) inflicted upon me, I never saw anyone browse there either. Other than me, and I don't count, being a mathematician, meaningfully beyond "0" and "1".
There are no shortages of browsers of libros en español at Wal-Mart in Visalia, and that was where we bought v7. Just two years ago we bought v5 at a Wal-Mart in the Upper Peninsula.
We're reading one text in turns. Grace pulls ahead with a 10 chapter start (car time going to the Big Trees), and MB and I swap the book between kitchen turns, picking up a chapter each, having done most of the first chapter while waiting for our turn on the one-lane section of highway that drops down a mountain side.
I read v1-v5 while walking behind Jonah and his blue pony tricycle on the trails and roads of the camps we stayed at two summers ago in the Upper Peninsula. Not too long ago Jonah mentioned his blue pony tricycle, lost since last August, on our return trip to the U.P. to write the now "historic" campaign plan for DraftGore 2008 PAC. Jonah's memory for places was established on that return trip when we got to Black River, and he took off like a shot at the first opportunity to run down the remembered path to cross the remembered bridge over the remembered river and climb up the remembered hill to the remembered forest and on to the remembered lunch spot on the banks of the Black River a mile up the harbor footbridge.
Yesterday we got to Big Trees after taking the twistiest roads, we made more turns in a few hours than a year's worth driving in Maine. Jonah was more interested in rock hopping and hanging on the split rails that protect the shallow roots of the Sequoia trees from foot traffic than he was in the wicked big trees, but eventually I cornered his chin and forced him to look up at the largest living thing on earth and whispered in his ear "big big tree". Later that day when I asked him what we did he said "big b... big b... big big tree", which is the first time I've ever gotten an answer, a narrative of experience remembered.
Jonah likes the Potter films, and he's singing a mean Beatles accompaniment, and were it not for Michael Bérubé's review of HP and his son as an HP reader, I'd never have picked up v1, then v2, then v3, ...
