Reading, Heavy and Light

Last week, my team at work was trying to think of a group Halloween costume. One of my co-workers has a toddler and his family went as the Flintstones: Fred, Wilma and Pebbles. Thinking of cartoons from my childhood, I thought of Winnie the Pooh, which then got me thinking about Beatrix Potter.

Half of my team was born in India, so they have not necessarily read all of the same books I read as a child or I read to the Boy and Claire-Adele. The stories of Winnie the Pooh, when told in plot summary, sound completely ridiculous.

• Pooh visits Rabbit's hole and eats too much hunny. Pooh gets so fat, he can't squeeze out of Rabbit's hole. Rabbit paints a face on Pooh's bottom and hangs towels on his feet. Piglet sits outside with Pooh as he waits to get skinnier until they can pull him out of the hole.

The point of the story is friendship, that even when we do something stupid--which we will--good friends will be there for us, just like Piglet was there for Pooh.

The Boy loved Beatrix Potter. His favorite story when he was three or four or five was The Tale of Two Bad Mice. There were two kind mice who tried to set up home in a little girl's dollhouse. They explore the dollhouse and are surprised when the dolls don't talk back. They knock a few things over, and are dismayed when they try to eat the food and it is made of plaster.

"Bam! Bam! Bam!" One of the mice takes a fire place tool and beats the food to bits after he tried to eat it but couldn't. The beautiful thing about childhood is that I could read that passage over and over again to the Boy, and he would laugh each time as if he had ever heard it before. He would wait, knowing it was coming, and burst. It was pure joy.

Now that the Boy is getting settled, I am starting to find things to do that I enjoy, like reading. I just finished a very short book A Sin By Any Other Name: Reckoning with Racism and the Heritage of the South by Robert W. Lee IV, a great-nephew of the Confederate General Robert E. Lee. The most interesting thing I learned from the book was from his word choice. Instead of using the word racism, he uses "white supremacy." I found that interesting. To me, racism has the connotation that people of color are less than others. White supremacy implies white people think they are more than others. It is simple to think someone else can be less, but it much harder to justify why we are better than others.