April 26, 2023: The Wednesday Read -

Romeo, the 6 year old kid who doesn’t read, but calls himself “a numbers guy,” came in today and grabbed some Pigeon stories off the shelf, as he does every week. I told him I had heard an interview with the author, Mo Willems, this weekend. The first Pigeon book came out 20 years ago, and also, The Pigeon just made his operatic debut. 

(Great NPR segment.) The Pigeon is very operatic on the page. He has Feelings.  Big feelings.

We started on the first book, and then I stopped and said, “You know, we can read these again. But if you want to, we can read something else. Up to you.”

“Let’s ahm-wissle fo it!” said Romeo. (He doesn't do R's.)

Took me a minute, but I got it. “We don’t need to arm-wrestle! You can just choose a different book. Or not!”

“Let’s ahm-wissle! If I win -- same books! If you win -- new books!”

“No,” I said. “You just choose.”

He got some new books and sat back down. He said, in a distracted way, “If we do this for seven years, we will be together 365 times.”

I gaped at him. He’s six. I said, “How did you do that? You’re right!”

(You may insist that no, it’s really 364 more times, but I’m not sure that's so. Consider leap years, and such. He may have tossed one session on each end. I sure wasn’t going to nitpick.)

He just grinned his toothless grin. “No, really, Romeo,” I said. “How did you do it?”

He leaned very close to my ear and whispered, “I guessed.”

(I said to Rick this evening: I don’t think he guessed - I think he couldn’t explain to me how he did it. Rick said: Same thing. If you can’t explain it, call it a guess.)

Tex, meanwhile, is reading more and more. Also, he’s turning into a literary critic. (Celia bends fingers, blows on fingernails, modestly polishes them on shirt.) He observed that the books we read today all “turned nice in the end.”

Indeed they did. I asked what he made of that. He pursed his mouth and shook his head disapprovingly. Do not try to foist a pat little happy ending on our Tex. He’s wise to that trick.