There are some books that were a part of my childhood that I just cannot shake. Perhaps it was because I read it a zillion (and a half) times or maybe it was because the name Clarence, for a dog, is kinda memorable. Especially because – spoiler alert! – Clarence turns out to be a girl, delivering a litter of puppies at the end of the book. At any rate, the story I most remember from this particular book – which, alas, I no longer own – isn’t about the dog or the TV or even about his (er, her) adoptive family which included tweens Brian and Sis.
No, the most memorable story (for me) had to do with a certain less-than-favorite spinster aunt who injected herself into the family for an extended visit. (And in all honesty, I’m not sure if this chapter is from this book or the end-of-your-seat sequel: Clarence Goes to Town.)
Aunt Spinster was a fifties stereotype of the unmarried, unattractive, unmarriageable woman: a bossy, angular know-it-all – at least, this was the kind of nemesis character that populated children’s books. And most definitely she did not approve of Clarence. Dogs, and children, were to be seen and not heard. Dogs should not watch television or act like humans. And most definitely, dogs (or children) should not mess with skunks.
Except Clarence does mess with a skunk. And you know what sort of havoc and misery that can cause.
Up until the skunk debacle, Brian and Sis have been harangued by their Aunt – not only is she always telling them what to do or what to think, she tells them how to do it or how to think it. Her accomplice in her mean knowledge is a mysterious Everything Book – some sort of mystical encyclopedia that Aunt S carries with her everywhere and consults constantly and religiously. The proper temperature to cook chicken? The capital city of Eritrea? The etymology of the word etymology? All of this seemed to be at her fingertips with a flip through her Everything Book. Sort of like Pre-Google.
For Brian and Sis, harangued to an inch of their lives, their collaborative solution seems like it would be obvious: Find the Book. Destroy the Book. But no, the siblings just want to get their hands on it so that they can get their own copy of said book and start beating their aunt at her game, looking up the answers and ringing in before she does. I’ll take ‘Famous Know-It-Alls and Their Comeuppance’ for $2000.00, Alex.
When they finally do manage to send their aunt on some urgent mission sans book, they page through only to find out that it’s not a book: it’s a scrapbook, a compendium of curiosities cobbled from newspapers and copied from books.
Oh, how I wanted a book like that.
Maybe that’s what sent me down the scrapbook-making quest I have been on since I was a tween myself. Partly a thirst for wanting to know All The Things and partly a love for pasting things into books, I have been creating my own Everything Books for years. Sometimes I call them Art Journals or Junk Journals or Just Journals with Extra Bits of Goodness Stuck Inside Them, but all of them are basically my attempt to save everything, know everything (at least the stuff I want to know) and remember everything.
This blog, I have realized has become a new kind of Art/Junk/Everything Journal for me. And bonus, it’s highly searchable, with a flick of my fingertips just as Aunt S would do when I want to look up something that I want to remember.
Of course, Bossy Aunt Saves the Day, consulting her book and instructing the kids in how to bathe Clarence in tomato juice to rid him of his/her skunky odor. And they decide (as she’s packing up to leave) that maybe she and her book have some value after all.