I don’t get the opportunity to see niece Rachel too
often. I did see her in June, when we
made our yearly trek to West Virginia
for the annual Shreve reunion (a.k.a. “The Driest Weekend of the Year”), so I
was really pumped about her visiting.
The first night she’s here, she tells my mom she can’t sleep—and with
the day she had, with the travel and planes and all, it’s no wonder—so “Nana”
gets the idea to let her hang out in my room and watch DVDs on my portable
player.
I had the Bozo collection I told you about on top of a
waste-high shelf, and upon seeing that she wanted to watch some of the
shows. I couldn’t figure out how she
knew who Bozo was until she reminded me that I had got her a Bozo doll a few
Christmases back—which I did; I bought one at a Cracker Barrel at which the
‘rents and I breakfasted on some long forgotten trip. (Normally, I do not make it a habit to eat at
the Barrel because I strenuously disagree with their policy of refusing to
allow homosexuals serve me my food, but since I wasn’t paying I made an
exception.) She watched about a show and
a half of the World’s Famous Clown, and then announced she was going to bed. But then she stops, and looks at some other
DVDs on the shelf.
“What’s that one with the moose?” she asks.
Lo and behold, she had found my Rocky and Bullwinkle
stash. And like the proud uncle I am, we
watched a few of those before she definitely decided that it was time to hit
the hay.
Rachel is pretty bright for her age, but many of the jokes
from the residents of Frostbite Falls
went over her head—this, however, didn’t matter. One of the great things about kids is that
they don’t discriminate when it comes
to cartoons. We watched a couple of the
Bozo shorts—and let me tell you, the animation is lousy—but she didn’t care at
all…nor did she go off on a rant (the way I did when I got older) about the
limited animation that is Moose and Squirrel.
If it’s a moving drawing, they’ll sit and watch with rapt
attention. The other thing that I
marveled about my niece was that after we tucked a few Bozos under our belt,
she knew the theme song by heart. (I’m
lucky if I can remember the chorus.)
Rachel had a pretty good stay here in Savannah—she got to go
to the beach, swim in my step-Gran’s pool, played some games on the computer
(Bombast would pick that weekend to
go down, by the way) and watch Rocky and Bullwinkle, Bozo and Fun and Fancy Free (1947) with ol’ Uncle Ivan
(again, she couldn’t figure out why I was cackling during the Edgar
Bergen-Charlie McCarthy exchanges…but she did recognize Charlie when he first
appeared onscreen). The only downer came
when my Mom talked with her on the phone Sunday evening after they returned to Iowa :
she was in total tears because she had to go home after having so much fun.