This week has been crazy. Aunt Lina’s on the phone or the computer all the time, trying to get together funds to make this move happen. She sold one of her favorite pieces to a wealthy New York collector. She told me “I’ve always wanted to take another crack at that,” meaning she’ll be re-working the sculpture with “improvements.” I just hope she’s not disappointed.
She also spent time talking with school administrators from White Cedars. It seems that I have to take some sort of test to measure my “knowledge base.” The officials seem to think they may have to put me one grade below my age level, because I’ve been home schooled. It’s as if they think that what Aunt Lina and I have been doing isn’t going to live up to the lofty expectations of suburban NJ. I hear that parents in suburban NJ push their children into sports, activities, and studies in order ensure acceptance into top colleges. The information that the White Cedars Board of Education sent us was practically a brag-sheet about the number of kids in honors and Advanced Placement classes at their Middle School. Students in the White Cedars Middle School Band supposedly went on to receive music scholarships in college, and there was a separate page devoted to sports at the D.S. Whitsone Middle School of White Cedars.
Now this cracks me up, although some people (especially those from White Cedars) might not find it funny. You see, the town’s school mascot is the Green Knight. So the High School has variations of that as team names. Its football, baseball, and basketball teams are called the Green Knights. Girls’ teams are called the Lady Knights. Junior Varsity teams are called the Junior Knights. The marching band is called the Green Hornets. So that leaves the D.S. Whitsone Middle School teams with slim pickings. Sports teams there are called the Green Pages. Yeah, that’s right. The name’s like some coupon section of a telephone directory. I imagine their mascot dressed like a big book. It’s like the throwaway script line in a John Hughes movie come to life. Insert joke here.
So my local district set up the testing for me. I had to spend two days this week in a room a nearby elementary school, with a teacher monitoring the test. Mrs. Addams, the test monitor, talked with me the day before the test, and advised me to bring a book along to read between parts of the test. She’d looked at some of my prior testing scores and figured I might need something to keep me occupied.
“By law, if a test section is supposed to take twenty minutes, I have to allow you the twenty minutes, even if you finish in five. I don’t know if it’s a test rule or a union rule, but I was told I have to do it that way. So if you hand me your test each time you finish a section, you can spend the remainder of that time reading,” she explained, in a warm, laughing tone. It’s hard to tell by a voice on the phone what someone looks like, but Mrs. Addams was just as I pictured her: a not too tall, not too skinny (but not fat) woman in her mid-forties who genuinely liked being a teacher. She wore a long wine-colored cotton dress with darker contrasting embroidery, and Sandals. She had a twinkle in her bright brown eyes, and wore glasses to read. This Mrs. Addams was no tall, willowy Morticia.
The test was easy enough. The only section I spent a great deal of time on was the Math section, but even then I had time to read afterward. Miss Addams shared some chocolates with me, and she had brought a novel, too. I was re-reading Topper by Thorne Smith. It’s a story about this banker in the 1920’s, and these zany wisecracking alcoholic ghosts. I loved the movie, but the book’s funnier. And a little sadder, too. Miss Addams was reading Water For Elephants which had been a movie out last spring. I hadn’t seen it; she said I should, but that the book was better. She was impressed that I was reading Topper, because most kids my age wouldn’t even see the black-and-white movie based on the book, let alone bother to find the book. She told me to read more of the author’s stuff—he was very funny, but apparently died way too young. She considered him brilliant, and said that he was the first to write about spirits as anything other than scary. If I have to go to school, I’d love to have a teacher like Miss Addams.
After the testing was over, Miss Addams said she wished more of her students could be like me. She taught Fourth Grade – the principal had been teaching her class during my testing. They would have had him administer the test for me, but because I was a girl, they decided on Miss Addams instead. I’m glad.
So we are mostly ready to move. Aunt Lina’s a little short tempered that the formalities are making the process of moving take longer than she feels it should, especially because the house in White Cedars had been empty for a few months. So I went next door to see Mrs. Kemper. She was making stuffed cabbage for a church festival. Steamed cabbage leaves lay on an aluminum tray on her counter; she was mixing the ground beef with rice and eggs when I knocked on the back porch door. Within minutes I had on an apron and was learning how to roll the meat into a cabbage leaf to form a dumpling-like packet that would be cooked in a tangy gravy. Mrs. Kemper baked her stuffed cabbage; she said other people cooked theirs on the stovetop. We talked about her family, her garden, the books I’ve been reading, the latest silly video she’d seen on the computer, just spending the afternoon together. Without ever actually agreeing on it, we avoided the subject of my upcoming move. It makes us both so sad.
But at the end of the afternoon, when I was ready to leave, she handed me a shopping bag with a small casserole dish full of stuffed cabbage for Aunt Lina and me to eat for dinner. It wasn’t until I unpacked it back at home that I realized there was more to it than just dinner. In the bag was a white index card with Mrs. Kemper’s neat handwriting on it. I couldn’t believe what she had given me today.
On that card was the recipe for her super-delicious Oatmeal Lace Cookies. And she hadn’t given it to Aunt Lina, as she’d promised. In the top corner of the card, she’d written “For Miranda, from the kitchen of Velma Kemper.”
I hadn’t known her first name until today. Mr. Kemper and Aunt Lina always her Vee. I never knew what it was short for.
So… I’m sure you’re wondering what the ingredients are, and how to make those crispy discs of sugary goodness that are unbelievable when you sandwich chocolate in between them. The recipe is a good one. But keeping in the tradition of my dear friend Velma Kemper, I’ll “have to write it down sometime…”
Until my next post…
Randi
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