The Blog Post in Which I Realize I Will Never Learn to Play the Flute

I just read that Montaigne's father had a servant play the flute every morning to gently wake his son. He raised a genius, so who am I to turn up my nose? This being the case, I suppose I should stop waking the twins by standing at the bottom of the stairs and screaming, "Get up! Get up! It's time to get up! Let's go, let's go!"

The beautiful thing is that for the next ten days or so I won't have to wake them up at all because today was the last day of school, and so summer is officially underway. They have camps and such on the horizon, but for now we are luxuriously left to our own devices. In preparation, we hit the library yesterday and checked out loads and loads of books. I swear I love the children's section best. I appear to be the first patron who has ever touched the brand new copy of Joan Aiken's The Serial Garden—The Complete Armitage Family Stories.


It now awaits me (what is it with me and proper English lady writers? You'll remember, of course, my literary love affairs with Jane Austen and Eleanor Farjoen). And I had to grab Roald Dahl's The Witches, as well, because of the first few pages:

In fairy tales, witches always wear silly black hats and black cloaks, and they ride on broomsticks.

But this is not a fairy tale. This is about REAL WITCHES.

The most important thing you should know about REAL WITCHES is this. Listen very carefully. Never forget what is coming next.

REAL WITCHES dress in ordinary clothes and look very much like ordinary women. They live in ordinary houses and they work in ORDINARY JOBS.

That is why they are so hard to catch...

Which child, she says to herself all day long, exactly which child shall I choose for my next squelching?

A REAL WITCH gets the same pleasure from squelching a child as you get from eating a plateful of strawberries and thick cream.

She reckons on doing away with one child a week. Anything less than that and she becomes grumpy.

Oh, that's so funny to me. Which—let's just face it—probably means that I'm never going to wake my kids up by gently playing the flute.