1982: Two Poems by My Daughter Gillian, Age 7

Thears a green mommey
I said to myself
and there's a red mommey
and there's a purple mommey
and there's a tan mommey
and there is a my mommey

I gave her the first line, "I'll never tell you," and this is what she wrote:

I'll never tell you
wate I have not even
when you are bad
not even when you are good
So do not beg me

Trivia Night

My library had another Trivia Night last week. This is a team competition, held every two or three months. I'm the captain of our team, which consisted of four people the first two times we competed. This time one of our members couldn't make it, so we did some recruiting and got up to six people.

The contest consists of 10 questions in each of 5 categories. When I saw the list of categories, I thought we were doomed:

Candy
Railroads
National Parks
Math
Superheroes

One of our members owns a health food store . . . how much could we possibly know about candy? An embarrassingly large amount, as it turned out.

Railroads? National Parks? A member is an editor of a children's magazine, and another member is retired from a similar job. As you might imagine, they've picked up lots of useful facts—useful on Trivia Night, anyway. And I was startled at how many National Parks answers I pulled out of thin air. I have no idea how I knew them. I didn't know beans about railroads though.

I was hoping for some math problems (the not-terribly-difficult variety), but the questions in that category were about the history of math. One of our members is a college student, and another remembers her education. (What a concept.) We did well.

As for superheroes, my grandson keeps me up to date on Batman, and the others took care of some of the rest. It was our worst category, but still not bad. We came in a close second. But I award us my own personal Grand Prize for sustained hilarity.