Reading: An Entertainment Weekly article about my beloved Freaks and Geeks.

Amused by: Tab's excitement over his new L. L. Bean parka. The man just loves Gore-Tex!

Cootie-Catcher

Yesterday afternoon when I arrived at Daniel's school to pick him up, I found him in tears. Miss Patty, the music teacher and Patrick's mother, had promised to make him a cootie-catcher, but she had forgotten and left without doing so.

"Don't worry, Dans. I'll make you one when we get home."

"You can do that?"

"Sure," I said, with more confidence than I felt. I remembered making cootie-catchers when I was in fourth or fifth grade--we called them "fortunes," then, not cootie-catchers--but I haven't thought about them since.

During the drive home, I mulled over the steps in my mind. Fold the paper this way first, then this way...no wait, the paper has to be a square, not a rectangle....

By the time we got home, I was pretty confident I could do it. I took a square piece of paper and folded the corners into the center. Turning the square over, I folded the corners in again. I bent it up, opened the flaps, and voila! It's amazing how some things just stay with you all your life.

Daniel was thrilled. "How did you know how to do that?"

"Oh, it was nothing," I said, modestly.

He happily took his cootie-catcher to the kitchen table where he decorated it and wrote in the answers under the flaps. A few minutes later he was back.

"Ask the cootie-catcher a question, Mama."

"Oh, I don't know. How about: 'Will Daniel straighten up his room today?' "

He laughed. "OK, now you have to pick a color."

"Blue."

"B-L-U-E," he chanted, opening and closing the cootie-catcher. He opened it to reveal the numbers written on the inside.

"Now pick a number."

"Three."

"One-two-three. OK, let me see...the answer is 'Yes!' "

"Well, good. Then how about going upstairs and fulfilling your destiny."

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