Today I heard Brian ask Uncle Stew what happened to Sophie’s real parents.
Uncle Stew said, “No idea.”
“How come you don’t know?” Brian asked.
Uncle Stew shrugged. “Nobody ever tells me anything.”
So I asked my father what happened to Sophie’s real parents, and he said, “I’ll tell you someday.”
“Tell me now.”
“No, don’t think so.”
Got yelled at for not understanding all the navigation gobbledygook. Got yelled at for joking around too much. Got yelled at for breathing. Well, almost.
Sophie told her first Bompie story today. It went something like this:
When Bompie was a young man, he lived on a farm, and his family was very poor. They didn’t even have a car or a truck. But one day they traded two mules for a car. The only thing was, no one knew how to drive it. Bompie had ridden in cars, though, and he didn’t think it could be all that hard to drive one. So Bompie volunteered to go to town to pick up the car and drive it home.
It was raining, raining, raining. You should hear Sophie tell a story. She really gets into it. You can almost feel the rain on your head when she tells it. You can feel it, you can smell it. It’s really something.
Anyway, Bompie goes to pick up the car and it’s raining, raining, raining. He’s driving home and he gets to the place where he has to cross the creek. There’s no bridge or anything. When they’d walked that way, or ridden the mules, they’d always just waded across it.
So Bompie drives the car into the creek, but the water is rushing, rushing so fast, it’s like a big wall of water coming down at him, and Bompie is yelling, “Hey! Giddy-up!” but the car won’t giddy-up, and that wall of water turns the car over, and Bompie scrambles out and watches the new car float down the stream.
When Bompie finally got home, he got a whipping from his father and an apple pie from his mother.
“Why’d she give him an apple pie?” Brian asked Sophie.
“Because she was grateful that he was alive, that’s why,” Sophie said.
“So how do you know this story anyway?” Brian said.
“Hush up, Brian,” Uncle Dock said.
But Sophie said, “Because Bompie told it to me, that’s how I know it.”
You could tell Brian wanted to say something else, but he didn’t. No one did.
I was sitting there thinking about Bompie getting out of that car and his mother giving him an apple pie.
Today Sophie and Uncle Dock each juggled three pretzel packets for a couple minutes! They were so excited. I felt pretty good myself. I’m a teacher!