Over the past few days Adam and I have been reading Otis Spofford as well as a few other books. Sometimes I wonder if Adam needs a break from Otis or if on occasion my timing is just off, because during one reading he seemed rather unenthusiastic. He may have just been tired, I suppose, or not in the mood for this boy, whom Adam doesn't always view as a sympathetic character. "He's mean," he says with surprise.
We don't finish a chapter at each reading (I don't, in fact, make that a goal), and on one night I didn't even get to a suitable transition spot. We just ended up stopping because it simply wasn't working well. Adam was, tired as he was, restless and simply could not sit still unless it was to go to sleep, which he did rather quickly after we decided to close the book. I was OK with stopping, but I felt a bit bad that it didn't seem a good experience for him, and wondered if fatigue was the only problem.
But he seemed to have recovered quickly because soon enough he was carrying the book around the house again and talking about Mutt the rat, whom Otis had smuggled contraband food into the classroom for, thereby upsetting a class experiment on nutrition. Mutt was supposed to be fed soda pop and bread while Pinky, another rat, was fed leftovers from the school's lunch menu. Mrs. Gitler's goal in the end was to show that on pop and bread a rat would not grow well. Otis felt sorry for the rat, however, and his secret was at the cost of his own lunch hour (and lunch) as he was, unknown to his teacher, locked into the classroom--on one occasion while she sat just on the other side of the class from where he secreted himself. In the end it was revealed someone else, that disturbingly clean and neat and obedient girl Ellen Tebbits, was also secretly sustaining Mutt, and the two had a tense battle for who got to take home the rat at project's end.
"Raise your hand, Otis! Wave it!" Adam waved his hand wildly as if instructing Otis how to be seen by Mrs. Gitler, who was ignoring him following Ellen's confession. When he, too, confessed and the rat was awarded to Ellen--"Yes, Ellen, since you told us about feeding Mutt first, you may have him for a pet"--he was sorely disappointed and complained bitterly to himself. But Adam consoled him by advising of Ellen's tidiness and unsuitability for a pet rat. (Apparently he had started to feel a bit of sympathy for the fictional character!) As Otis sat in front of his home Adam predicted that Ellen, who at this point was walking down the street, would give him the animal. "Her mommy won't let her keep a rat!" And sure enough this is exactly how it turned out.
It was really interesting to watch all this unfold from the viewpoint of another, from a child, especially given that Adam has not always been this adept at such skills as predicting. His commentary has become somewhat astute as well, and I'm very eager to read to him with another child in attendance. I am curious to see another child's perspective, if Adam holds back with her present (I'm thinking of a particular friend of his), or if there is any kind of distracting quality in our new dynamic.
The next time we read was a bit different. He was more subdued, but it didn't seem to be for any negative reason. It was also interesting to see that though insects were involved, he not only didn't mind, he was downright engaged. (In "real" life he is not fond of insects and often checks under his blanket (or sleeps on top) to make sure none are under there.) As with his lack of involvement with dogs, books seem to give him the opportunity to get closer to something, see what it is like or how it works, at no risk to him.
On a boring early evening after school, Otis and Stewy are canvassing the neighborhood looking for something to do when they happen upon Hack Battleson, a high school football player who has star status in the boys' eyes. Otis is unhappy and restless until then, and when he learns Hack needs to collect 30 bugs for a science project, he offers to help. Stewy follows suit and this bugs Otis, who dreams of being the sole saviour of the high school football team: Having collected the bugs, he would have freed Hack to practice his game.
But Stewy, much to Otis's (and Adam's) chagrin, insists on being a part of the action and the race is on! The boys have until 6.30 and the competition is fierce. Adam, who had chanted the "T-T-T-A-Y. L-L-L-O-R. T-A-Y. L-O-R. Ta-a-ay-lor!" cheer along with the boys earlier, now urged Otis to hurry up and get his bugs. At one point when Otis climbs a trellis Adam asked me to look it up on the Internet and show him a picture. I'd done this before as an easy way to give him a visual of something he was unfamiliar with, and like any smart child of our computerized information age, he remembered the lesson well. It kind of made me wonder in a sort of sidebar part of my thoughts at that moment, how he would later feel about Internet books. Would they be ordinary to him, having been born and raised on computers? Or would having had many books with pictures and possibly a special sort of aura about them be a mark against Web books?
Then I read a sentence about a fly and Adam chimed in with, "If you took his wings off would he be called a walk?" He was starting to get into the moment again and I laughed heartily at his memory of a joke we'd shared. When Stewy admonishes Otis for "stealing" a bug (because it came from the sidewalk in front of the rival's house), Adam quickly came to Otis's defense: "It's not your sidewalk," which was along the lines of Otis's own retort.
But Otis doesn't waste time arguing and goes to his own house to follow up on an idea; Bucky, a kindergarten neighbor dressed up as a cowboy, is there and begging for attention as usual. I was wondering how Adam might receive Otis's impatience with the kindergartner and characterizations of little kids, but he didn't seem bothered. The cowboy costume might have saved Bucky in the eyes of our own kindergarten reader.
In the end Otis, who has only 29 bugs and fears Stewy has beaten him, discovers one of Stewy's gems is actually a spider, a critter Hack had prohibited for its non-insect status (too many legs). Just as the discovery is made known to Hack, the dog scratches himself--as he had in the beginning of the story, a neat little way to fit things together--and Otis gets the idea to, "get a flea off the dog!" Adam mightn't have thought of this had we not read about how fleas had played a role in Ribsy and that dog's inability to return to his owner (who had taken the collar off to give the poor pooch some relief). But then again, all predictive ability relies on previous knowledge, and I felt a lot of pleasure that Adam had gained from it for his body of knowledge and brought it to bear here.
Once more Otis settles for a compromise of sorts as Stewy insists the flea belongs to him--it is his dog after all. Running home for dinner, Otis consoles himself with a fantasy of being Five Yard Spofford, running towards a touchdown to save the Zachary P. Taylor High School football team's big game.
This reading was actually a few days ago and as I type this I recall Adam asking on a following afternoon, "What does compromise mean?" I answered his inquiry and we discussed it, but it didn't occur to me until just now that he may have been remembering it from our discussion of the chapter after we stopped reading for the night. I can't really be sure, as he hears and reads all kinds of words big and small, but true to the childlike ability to teach us grownups a thing or two, I was given a reminder of how long those post-reading summaries last in a child's mind. Not just days, but also, as the information becomes part of his being, a lifetime.
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