I'm Not Sure if I Succeeded

“Can you make us something for breakfast?”  My daughter had a middle school dance last night and a gaggle of girls had slept over.  Typically, around 11:30PM our lights went off.  Really?  Use the flashlight on your iPhone, grab the card you need to charge up and open the garage door so you can . . . oh.  It’s an electric garage door opener.  Pull the bike in through the house and carry it out the front door so I can bike over to the main gate to recharge our electricity.   There is no way to know that you are running low on these cards until they simply run out.

I knew we’d gotten some raisins and bananas yesterday.  There was milk.  But what was I going to make or these kids?  I asked if they’d like pancakes and that was well received.  You want bananas, raisins or blueberries in them?  Blueberries. I suppose a normal person would consult a recipe at this point but I figured I remembered well enough how to put together a bowl of pancake batter.   Flower, egg, water and what?  Salt?  Needs to be the consistency of something you can pour in and watch extend out into a circle.

The first one was a little hard.  The blueberries looked somewhat detonated  but soon we had a stack.  I knew one of my daughter’s friends was a big Tolkien fan and I asked her what she was reading just now.  “A few different things.  But nothing really matches “The Lord of the Rings.”  I can remember looking for other trilogies after finishing “The Return of the King," when I was her age.  She was probably right.  There’s nothing to top Tolkien’s world, certainly in that genre.  But there is, of course, the real thing.

I told her that if she wanted to read the stuff that had inspired J.R. Tolkien himself, she ought to read the sagas.  “Do you know where Iceland is?”  I asked.  “Sort of.”  Soon I was trying to explain the early scene in Egil’s Saga where he cuts the head off another, older boy who bested him at a game, explaining how Egil's father thought this would mean trouble but his mom was glad, reckoning rightly that he’d grow to be a good Viking.  She and my daughter considered this.  I’m not sure if I succeeded in piquing their curiosity but just in case I returned from my room with a handful of sagas.  I wish someone had hipped me to the sagas when I was twelve and ensconced in Tolkien.  Hard to say if I would have dug in or searched on for something with a cooler cover. 

Saturday, 5/27/17