My third grader Max has an unusual take on the world and a very quirky sense of humor as a result. He loves to read, and he’s always gravitated to “horror” (Goosebumps books) and books with an odd or subversive sense of humor (Raold Dahl, Neil Gaiman, etc.). He brings this somewhat dark sensibility into the classroom.

So, for example, when given the prompt, “If I were a snowflake…”, Max finishes it this way:

“… I would have a short life unless I flew up because some little kids eat snowflakes not knowing what’s in them. There are many dangers to a snowflake, for example rainwater, snow blowers, us. The worst thing about being a snowflake would be having no head. I hate headless people. I don’t like heights, so I would hate to float but since floating means survival…”

His teachers — with whom, in general, we all get along with quite well — sometimes do not seem to appreciate this sort of thing. He usually gets an average mark, with “Interesting” written in the margins.  Lately, his writing has been getting rejected. Here’s an example of writing that was rejected for being too “silly”:

I will try to write a fable starting … now!

There once was a man who always worried his turtle would explode. Every night he yelled “Help! Help! Help! My turtle’s exploding!” And every day a stranger told him, “Your turtle will be fine.” Soon he took his advice and stopped giving the turtle Don’t Explode Pills. The next day the turtle exploded.

Don’t trust strangers.

The assignment was to create a fable with a lesson. I believe Max did that, in his own way. We love Max’s quirky sense of humor and his original writing. I think there may be other people who appreciate it, too, so I asked him if I could share some of it here, and he agreed, although I had to edit this post several times to meet with his final approval.

Thanks for reading.

You might have noticed that my blogging has ground to a halt this week. There’s a pretty specific reason for that: I’m a Hospice volunteer, and my “patient”, whom I have been visiting since June, died yesterday. People often ask me: “How can you do that? I could never do that!”, and I try to tell them how much friendship, pleasure, laughter, joy and love is present in my Hospice relationships, not just with patients but with the rest of the team and other volunteers. And that is true.

However, there is one period in the Hospice cycle when I really feel the force of that question, and it is when the patient is actively dying and dies. As an advocate of the Hospice philosophy, I know death brings with it release from suffering, physical, mental and existential. Moreover, most of the families I work with are Christian, and for them, death means that their loved one has gone to God, which is a more than a relief or release: it is the highest blessing.

But there is no getting around the fact of loss. Of course, I experience the loss of a friend. But that is nothing compared to others’ losses. Bearing witness to the grief of family and friends is hands down the hardest part of being a Hospice volunteer, especially in cases, as this one, when a disease like cancer takes someone much too young. When you look around a crowded room, as the death vigil is underway, and see a spouse who will be made a widow, a newly married son whose future children will never know their grandfather, a mother who never wanted to outlive her own children… that is tough, tough, tough.

So, it’s been hard to read Jenny Crusie this week, and hard to read anything actually. If you’ve experienced loss, you know that you go from feeling totally ok one minute to crying the next. For me, I wonder if the feeling that I just can’t commit to a book is part of the anxiety of seeing what mortality means up close. Then there’s the obvious emotional exhaustion. It is times like these when I appreciate having 150 channels to passively flip through, no commitment, no mental effort.

This kind of experience reminds me that we read, even within one genre, for a lot of different reasons. Sometimes to escape, but sometimes to feel more intensely our own “negative” or scary feelings. It also reminds me that there are many diverse choices within one genre. Finishing Jennie Crusie’s “screwball comedy” Trust Me On This has not been possible this week. But I was able to pick up J. R. Ward’s Lover Awakened and read the first two bleak, violent chapters to fall asleep last night. I may be having a sad time this week, but at least I am not being held captive in a corrugated metal pipe by a deranged lunatic who bathes me obsessively and calls me “wife”!

One last thing: I had lunch this week with a friend, a retired English professor. In an odd bit of timing, we’re working on a presentation for next week on death and dying. She shared with me a few poems about death. I thought I would share one of them — which I had never read before — with you:

When Death Comes

When death comes
like the hungry bear in autumn;
when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse

to buy me, and snaps the purse shut;
when death comes
like the measle-pox;

when death comes
like an iceberg between the shoulder blades,

I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering;
what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?

And therefore I look upon everything
as a brotherhood and a sisterhood,
and I look upon time as no more than an idea,
and I consider eternity as another possibility,

and I think of each life as a flower, as common
as a field daisy, and as singular,

and each name a comfortable music in the mouth,
tending, as all music does, toward silence,

and each body a lion of courage, and something
precious to the earth.

When it’s over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement,
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

When it’s over, I don’t want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument

Mary Oliver

Thank you for reading this blog, for commenting, for your emails and tweets and RTs.  Please keep visiting in 2011.

Thank you to my fellow book bloggers. I love reading your reviews, meditations, and goofy posts almost as much as I love reading novels. Keep blogging in 2011.

Thanks to the folks on Twitter for great conversation, (too) many book recs, answers to my arcane questions, and a laugh whenever I need it. Keep Tweeting in 2011.

Thank you to writers –  aspiring, newly contracted, debut authors, midlisters, bestsellers, self-published, e-published, Smashworders, whoever you are, whatever and wherever you write. Thank you, thank you, thank you. Keep writing in 2011.

If you are in the book blogging community, especially if you are in the romance community, you’ve made my year. Thank you.

Whatever you are doing, whether it’s a ski holiday, a big party, a nice dinner with friends, braving a downtown First Night with kids, or staying in with a good book and a warm beverage, have a Happy New Year!

See you in 2011!

All is well. I’m just busy. I’ll be back.