Daddy had to go away on a business trip to Winnipeg and Calgary for a week, and Mom’s all gloomy around the house. He telephoned from Winnipeg last night, and Mom talked downstairs, and me and Brian fought over the telephone upstairs. I won.
A couple of days later, Mom finally got a letter from a magazine that they would publish one of her short stories. She was so excited, she didn’t even know what she was doing. So she made bread dough and forgot to put in any salt and the rolls tasted icky. And she cooked liver for supper that day, and she knows we hate liver (well I do, anyway). Like, if she’s celebrating or something, why torture me?
When Dad came home he was excited about his wife, the author. Big deal, one lousy story (It wasn’t even a good one. I didn’t think so anyway, although I didn’t tell her that). What about all the other ones that’ve come back with reject slips?
But I’m glad for her anyway, because it’s awful when we come home for lunch and see one of those things sitting on the table, those awful reject slips. She never hides them, she thinks we should know about how she suffers or something, I guess. And usually she’s in a kind of miserable mood, afterward, for at least a day. Not very pleasant at all.
The next day, Dad brought home a box of chocolates for Mom, as a congratulatory present. We thought that was pretty neat. Mom doesn’t really eat chocolates all that much, but we do.
Bob says I’m doing fine with my flute lessons. He says I’ve got to practise the pieces he gives me, more than I do. I told him I practise lots, every day. But he knows by now that I practise the pieces I like, and not the ones he gives me to do. We play duets a lot, and that’s really fun, too.
He’s pretty good technically, but even I can recognize that his tone’s not so terrific. He told me that a lot of the music students don’t play too well, but they’re more interested in music history and theory and in a future of teaching music. I really like it when he talks to me like that. I mean, tells me about university and things. Mom thinks I have a crush on him. She even asked me. But I told her no. And it’s true. Just because I dress up a little more than usual when I go to my lessons, she thinks that. After all, she’s always telling me to be neat.
Some of the kids at school are starting to talk about next year at high school. We took home option sheets for next year, and had to fill them out. The parents were invited to a meeting about grade eight students where the guidance counsellors of Ridgemount High talked to them about the subjects we could take. I’m taking music of course, double option, and geography (ugh), and history and math (ugh-ugh), and science and English and no French (yay!). And Phys. Ed.
We’ve started our last session of Home Ec. And me and Jennifer are in cooking. We made peanut butter cookies last week, and they weren’t bad at all. I took most of mine home in a little plastic bag, but somehow by the time I got home they were all in crumbs and you couldn’t tell they were ever cookies.
I showed them to Mom and I thought she’d laugh or something, because here I showed her this bag of big crumbs and I was saying “see the cookies we baked today?”. She didn’t laugh. She seemed interested and tried some, and was I ever surprised. She said they were good, could I give her the recipe? Well sure, I have the recipe in my notes, but it’s only for a small amount. Mom said she’d increase the ingredients and make up a batch of them next week.
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