Today was all over the place -- some very good, some very bad. A bit of very good happening this very minute: I can see the half-moon right out my west-facing window which means it isn't raining for once. Hooray!
I was looking for something on flickr (and thinking about a cc license for my pictures -- but I'll save that for another post) and saw these snaps from The Sea Fairies by L. Frank Baum. I came across this (along with many of the Oz books) when I was moving some stuff for my mom last year. This copy was my dad's book when he was a boy, a gift from his grandmother who encouraged him to get his nerd on. (her EXACT WORDS. okay, not really.) Anyway, I remember reading this when I was a little girl and just falling for all of it in a big way. It was so exotic! The ocean part I GOT since I have always loved the ocean (we lived on the Gulf of Mexico, which is close enough when you're six) -- it made perfect sense to me that people would live in the depths of the sea. I was so entranced by the peonies that appear in the book -- frankly, those were as exotic to me as living under water in a mermaid palace. ( I think of that book every time I cut peonies in the spring/summer.)
ANYWAY, my childhood best friend lived 2 miles up the road (which wasn't far since we lived in the sticks), and she had a horse and an orange grove. I was at her house all the time. Her dad had bought two donkeys to keep the horse company. The big news was I was going to get to name one! EXCITING. Of course I totally flubbed it! I was reading this book and the girl's name is Trot, which I suggested. It's all well and good if it's 1911 and you're visiting an underwater kingdom, but it's really lame if you're a donkey living in gulf-coast florida. Her dad never said anything directly to me, but I was relieved when he named it Festus instead. (a FAR SUPERIOR name for a donkey!) I was thinking about this tonight and going "hey... the horse's name was Star, which is also really lame!" but then I realized that Priscilla (my friend) had named the horse but her dad was the one who really the gift for naming things -- Priscilla (the daughter), Sallafina (the cat), Festus (the donkey) -- these are all obviously the work of the same fine mind. (Sallafina is one reason I was so taken with Philip Pullman's Dark Materials trilogy (especially the first book) -- the truly excellent name of witch Serafina Pekkala reminded me of the cat -- especially since the cat was all black and rather witchy herself.)
To sum up: 1) Peonies are impossibly beautiful even when you can pick them in your own front yard 2) I defer to others on all donkey naming, although Festus is a good one. 3) The Sea Fairies is available as a free e-book since it has passed into the public domain. Do yourself a favor and get one with the John R. Neill illustrations though.
