Bad Cats and the Rich

        The final story, or rather memory, I have from that summer twenty three years ago when the girls and I read The Parables of Jesus together has to do with one evening when I was fixing dinner.

          As I recall, we read the Parables at lunch time and would talk about it a little afterward. In the afternoon we read from Ivanhoe – which we enjoyed immensely and had a lot of laughs over. At bedtime there was yet another book – several of which we went through those wonderful months.

          It was that summer that Amanda began reading on her own. While fixing dinner every night, Bodie would bring a book, usually Dr. Seuss, to the kitchen, plunk herself on the kitchen floor at my feet – we were still at the rented Georgia house, on Realm Lane, and the kitchen was long and narrow, so I could easily move around Amanda and still be near enough to hear her.

          I remember this all so clearly because one night when Amanda was reading The Cat in the Hat, she suddenly looked up and exclaimed, “Mom! This is a really bad cat!” And I just had to shake my head to think that it took reading the book herself to realize the Cat in the Hat was full of uncomfortable mischief!

          So, throw into the mix of my fixing dinner in the kitchen and Amanda at my feet reading out loud, Sarah making conversation at the kitchen table. At some point Goobs mentioned something she was going to do someday, and I quite glibly, a reflex action to be sure more so than anything I gave any deep thought to, said to Sarah, “When you grow up and get a job and get rich, you will be able to do just that!”

         Which triggered an immediate response from the Goobs:

         “Oh I will never get rich, Mom! Not after what it says in the Parables about rich people never going to heaven!”

         Whoa!

         Oh my gosh!

         That stopped me in my tracks!

         What kind of subversive mother was I?

         How dare I let my children read the Parables and get such strange ideas from them!

         Talk about a plan backfiring royally!

         “You know,..... if you were to get rich, I'm sure you could be the exception rather than the rule!”

          I kind of stammered out the words, but with one daughter reading from a book, and the other telling me her dreams of the future, I don't think either of them heard.

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