Saturday, February 5, 2011

Sweet Happy Evening

My friend Michele, who is a professor in the School of Education at CU, is the mother of two wonderful, bookish daughters. Three years ago I had the great joy of being a guest at her older daughter's mother-daughter book group, which had just finished reading my book Trading Places. Last night I had the great joy of being a guest at her younger daughter's mother-daughter book group, which had just finished reading my book The Totally Made-Up Civil War Diary of Amanda MacLeish.

Even though I love my own two boys more than anything in the world, there is some small part of me that wishes I could have had a daughter, too, a bookish daughter, a daughter who would have been in a mother-daughter book group with me. So it was bliss last night to be there with these five mothers and five daughters, eating a delicious Italian pasta-bar dinner at Michele's beautiful house, and sharing with these girls their own love of books. I loved being able to tell them all the things that I had been thinking about as I crafted Amanda's story and to hear about stories they were writing themselves. And of course, I also tried to get from them as many stories as I could about classroom drama - which boys were annoying and why, which teachers were cool and why. Material!

I even got to play a game with them, whose rules I never figured out, called Murder. First I would tap each girl on the shoulder, secretly tapping one of them twice; then that girl became the murderer, who somehow murdered the others through an elaborate hand-shaking ritual. I still don't understand the game, but enjoyed playing the role of tapper and hearing the squeals of laughter from murderer and murdered alike.

It was an altogether wonderful evening.

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