Poem for Friday

The Owl and the Pussy-Cat
By Edward Lear

The Owl and the Pussy-Cat went to sea
   In a beautiful pea-green boat:
They took some honey, and plenty of money
   Wrapped up in a five-pound note.
The Owl looked up to the stars above,
   And sang to a small guitar,
"O lovely Pussy, O Pussy, my love,
   What a beautiful Pussy you are,
            You are,
            You are!
   What a beautiful Pussy you are!"

Pussy said to the Owl, "You elegant fowl,
   How charmingly sweet you sing!
Oh! let us be married; too long we have tarried,
   But what shall we do for a ring?"
They sailed away, for a year and a day,
   To the land where the bong-tree grows;
And there in a wood a Piggy-wig stood,
   With a ring at the end of his nose,
            His nose,
            His nose,
   With a ring at the end of his nose.

"Dear Pig, are you willing to sell for one shilling
   Your ring?" Said the Piggy, "I will."
So they took it away, and were married next day
   By the turkey who lives on the hill.
They dined on mince and slices of quince,
   Which they ate with a runcible spoon;
And hand in hand, on the edge of the sand,
   They danced by the light of the moon,
            The moon,
            The moon,
   They danced by the light of the moon.

--------

A lovely Thanksgiving was had by all members of my family, at least so far as I could tell by everyone's mood (a marked change from last year, when my sister and family decamped to a hotel and my parents did not speak for days). The original plan was to take the kids to lunch at a pizza place and then go to an early movie, but the youngest niece began to melt down, so my sister and her husband went off to distract her while and I picked up my father and the two older nieces. Turned out all the pizza places within easy commute were closed for the day, so we ended up in a deli, which turned out to be just as well since all the picky eaters found something they liked on the menu and I got an all-too-rare excellent lox and bagel.

Then we went to The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie (at a Regal rather than a Loews theater because the times were better and we figured The Twenty would serve as a good distraction before the movie). I will admit that after waiting nearly a full hour in the theater for it to start, holding the seats while everyone else went to the arcade and the concessions, I spaced out somewhere in the middle of the voyage to Shell City. But my younger son and oldest niece were laughing hysterically at the top of their lungs, which itself was quite enjoyable to listen to. TV cartoons on the big screen generally don't hold my interest all that well; in most cases it's just bigger and louder, though this one had a framing story involving pirates that was rather amusing.

We went back to my parents' house and played for awhile before dinner...well, I took pictures of the kids, my mother worked on dinner, my sister cooked her own green beans so she could have onions in them which my parents don't like, the men watched the Dallas game and the kids ran around screaming like lunatics. The food as always was fantastic -- I could take or leave the turkey, actually, but the carrot souffle, sweet potatoes and cranberries are among my favorite things, plus my mother made German chocolate cake. So we are all stuffed and happy about everything but the Cowboys victory, which is really a small blemish, though my father might disagree.

Because all the kids were crashing after a long day, we came home early and watched Inventing the Abbots after getting ours into bed. I'd never seen it before, though how I'd managed to miss a movie where the protagonist went to Penn and which stars Liv Tyler and Jennifer Connelly as sisters is really beyond me. I enjoyed it a lot (even though it was obviously not really filmed at Penn) and thought Liv and Joachim Phoenix were wonderful but cannot write anything approaching critical comments because I am in the L-tryptophan zone at present. Going to bed early for me on a non-school night...shall try to catch up tomorrow.


The centerpiece of the day, just out of the oven.