forgotten
Getting some water in the office kitchen a few minutes ago, I glanced over to the fridge. A magnet on the side caught my eye. It was advertising Burke Street Pizza, the restaurant we order our pizza from during office lunches and other functions.
My mind drifted to the last time I had takeout pizza. It was at Diane’s parents’ house during a tornado watch. Whenever there’s a watch we camp out over there, since our apartment doesn’t have a basement and Clemmons seems to be in the “line of fire” of many tornado-producing weather systems. The last time we were there was a couple of weeks ago. Diane’s parents had graciously ordered pizza for us, and we had eaten and put the kids to bed in the upstairs bedroom. Diane and her sister were downstairs watching TV, and I was upstairs at the kitchen table performing “guard duty” in case one of the kids decided to wander out of the bedroom. I had a glass of Coke to wash down the pizza, and there was a beautifully-illustrated copy of Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows sitting on the table in front of me. Diane’s dad read it to her and her siblings when they were little, and he bought a fresh copy so he could read it to Luke and Penelope as well. He had attempted to do just that downstairs earlier, before the kids went to bed, and at the time they played around the room with other toys, not paying his reading the slightest amount of attention. They’re just unable to follow it at this point in their lives.
I picked it up, though, there at the kitchen table, and dug in. I finished about three-quarters of it before Diane came upstairs and I had to make a quick run back to the apartment to gather a few things. During the time I was reading, however, I was completely absorbed by the book. There was something enchanting about it. I remembered watching the Disney animated version of the book when I was younger, and there was a familiarity there borne out of the obvious parallels with the book that made it seem very…cozy. Beyond that, though, the writing and illustrations themselves had a quality to them that felt like a comfortable easy chair. Maybe it was the “warm” British-ness of it all. Perhaps it was the lengthy descriptions of settings and meals. It could have been the general good nature of all the characters in the story. Most likely it was a fusion of all of those qualities.
Seeing the magnet on the fridge just brought back the sensations of the whole of that evening. And I definitely intend to finish the book.