Lazy Kind of Sunday

Spent a lazy Sunday morning just hanging around. I slept in (though not as long as last week), made Banana Chocolate Chip Pancakes, listened to the Beatles show on WOGL ("B sides of singles" was the theme today), read Calvin and Hobbes comics, and messed around online. I tried to get through to Mom several times, but I kept getting a busy signal. I assumed she was having a long phone chat with either Rose or her sister Terri and decided I'd call back after work.

Calvin and Hobbes is a recent thing with me. I was about Calvin's age when the strip first came out and, despite many of my peers' fondness for it, steadfastly resisted reading it regularly until I found Attack of the Mutant Snow Goons at the thrift shop two years ago. I laughed so hard, I ended up buying it. I've bought two more, the first one and Yukon Ho!, since then, and have taken out three other collections and The Authoritative Calvin and Hobbes from the Haddon Township Library. (Thank goodness for their massive comic book section!)

Calvin brings back a lot of memories for me. While I did have some things in common with Calvin - I was a decent student except for math (which I would have gladly hidden from...and still would), I had trouble with bullies, I thought the opposite sex existed to drive me bananas - in other things, he reminded me a lot more of my sisters.

- I never had any problems reading. For me, it was an escape. For my sisters, unless it was R.L Stine or comic books, it was a pain. (At least until Rose became a fantasy fanatic in high school. After that, she was reading as much as me. Anny and Keefe still aren't big readers, though.)

- I almost always ate what Mom put in front of me, partially because I'm really not a picky eater, partially because Mom's a genuinely great cook. Keefe to this day has no problem eating anything living, dead, or in between. Anny and Rose, however, have always been much pickier. One famous incident involved the time Mom made spinach crepes for Dad's birthday. He adored them. I loved them (and have repeatedly asked Mom for the recipe). Anny and Rose loathed them so much, Mom never made them again, much to my annoyance.

- Rose and Keefe are big fans of organized sports. Anny and I are not. This made any attempted games of soccer, softball, street hockey, volleyball, badminton, croquet, or football look more like "Calvinball" than any known version of those games.

- We had our own anti-boys club for several years when we lived on Maryland Avenue in Cape May. "The Tiger Lilly Girls' Club" was named after the large plot of said flower in front of the old guest house used as a clubhouse by us and our girlfriends. We'd meet a few times a summer and mostly ended up playing dress-up or making plots against the neighborhood boys we'd never really carry out. Later versions of the club did made half-hearted attempts to integrate males, mostly by request of Rose the tomboy who had several guy pals. ("The Tiger Lilly Club" would go on temporary hiatus during the fall and winter, partially due to school, but mostly because the guest house wasn't heated and smelled of dust and mold.)

- My sisters were more overtly rebellious than I was. They were the ones who stayed out too late, went places they weren't supposed to, climbed trees, got dirty, played with their toys to death, and drove Mom and Dad up the wall. The only way I did that was by being the opposite. I was a homebody who never really wanted to go anywhere, to the point where, by the time I was old enough to be going beyond the neighborhood on my own, Mom's usual answer to my "I'm bored" was "Why don't you go outside and amuse yourself?" This is when I began my rambling walks, in this case all over Cape Island, though it would inevitably include a long stop at the Cape May City Library.

(Keefe fell somewhere in between. He was more likely to go out and about than me, but he tended to get into less trouble than either of the girls when he did. In later years, he was usually accompanied by a posse of his neighborhood friends, all good guys who rarely got into any really major trouble.)

- Calvin would be surprised by the way the girls and I used to amuse ourselves. Yeah, we did all the girls' stuff - house, school, tea parties, dress-up - but we also created elaborate save-the-world plots with toys ranging from My Little Pony to Star Wars, from She-Ra to Thundercats, from stuffed animals to model planes. We raced Hot Wheels and built with Legos and wooden blocks (and Keefe inherited all three when he got old enough). We made whole communities with Little People, long after we'd grown out of them. We had plastic cats, dinosaurs, and little green army men. We built tents from sheets and fortresses from boxes. Anny's old baby tub made a great sailboat. Mom was a big feminist in the 70s, and she encouraged her daughters to do whatever they wanted, play the way they wanted to play, regardless of gender.

Thank goodness, work was still really busy but not as bad as yesterday. I figured out why it was so busy this weekend, too - there was a really huge 3-day sale going on (including that $1.99 Edy's I got on Friday).

And I did eventually get a hold of Mom. She WAS on the phone with Rose for a few hours this morning. Both seem to be fine. Mom was in a great mood - I could hear Keefe eating and Skylar yelling and Dad getting ice for his tea (he'd drink all ice if he could) in the background.