Two Unrelated Stories

...totally mangled by the memory of your faithful blogstress....

Scary Story From My Dad
So he lives out in the country, where there are SNAKES. That's a scary story by itself, right? But here's another one...there were these two snakes in his fire pit. Which is only a few yards away from the house, to which I say: TIME TO MOVE. There was, like, this married snake couple, and they wouldn't leave the pit, but after awhile Dad decided to start a fire in the pit to persuade them to find new digs. Which worked on one snake but not the other! I'm going to posit that the stay-put snake was pregnant, because that makes this a better story.

Anyway, Dad had to use a shovel to scoop the half-burned, still slithery snake out of the pit. He tried to throw it into a nearby meadow (my favorite word--did you know that?), but he threw too hard and the snake got caught in a tree. And its burning skin fused it to a branch! So the snake corpse was there all summer, eventually rotting down into a skeleton, entangled in the tree.

You've-Gotta-Be-Kidding Story From Heather
A woman called the children's department, to tell us that she'd forgotten to give her child his library card that morning. Not a big deal, Heather assured her. But her child was visiting with his class today and wouldn't be able to check out books like the other children! No, Heather assured her--he could just go up to the circulation desk with his teacher. But that would be humiliating for him, to do something different from his classmates! Uh...no, Heather assured her, it would be okay.

Couldn't the woman just fax a copy of both sides of the card to the library, and then Heather could cut them out and glue the front and back together and then surreptitiously slip it to the kid so that he could pretend that it was a real card without his peers knowing what had happened? No, Heather assured her, because that would make me as crazy as you. (Heather might have just thought this last part to herself.)

Comments

[Claire]

Somehow, I found myself almost identifying with the mother in this story. I suppose it is not Oak Park Library policy to accuse five-year-olds of stealing library cards, then cutting up said library card and throwing it away. Up until the point when all of my friends suddenly became librarians, I had not met with one single librarian saner than this mother. How very refreshing to hear of a library that doesn't make scarring children for life and giving them an irrational fear of libraries its main priority (yes, Blackstone Library, I'm talking about you here).

[Molly]

That snake story isn't real.