Inspired by Josh’s Maurice Sendak post (and by Casey’s link to the “Fresh Air” interview with Sendak).

A ground crewman who worked on my father’s WWII plane told me their B-26 Marauder was known as the “whore of the skies.” I feel like I can’t say the rest of his quote on this family wire. It crashed a lot. So use your imagination. This was about 15 years ago, during a ceremony for a large marker with the names of the men associated with Flak Bait when it was displayed at Smithsonian’s Air and Space Museum. This old fella said this to me right in front of Miss Nell, who smiled politely and said, “Okay, well now…” and took my arm and hustled ME off.

And I should point out that the Lego Technic sets that I had as a kid are still actively developed, you just wouldn’t know it walking down the lego aisle at your local toy store.

And that brings up an even bigger point, which is that the internet has freed the long tail to go live in cheap ecommerce space, rather than cutthroat toy store shelves. If there’s a particular brick you need, there are official and unofficial places to get it. Whole communities of people online trade designs for their new transmission gearbox.

I’d argue that there’s never been a better time to get your kid interested in legos, male or female.

My parents are a doctor and nurse respectively and both would like to donate their bodies to science. They both agree that they would not like any medical intervention to keep them living longer. Also, my dad has tendencies to not get medical attention when needed. I was a day away from being admitted to a hospital with pneumonia, as both parents thought I just had an upper respiratory infection. I’d like to see an article about children of medical professionals and their thoughts about dying.

On waking, I recalled that our neighbors the next street over from Dutton Drive had named their daughters after movie stars. Lana. And Rita. But their last names were not Turner. Nor Hayworth.

She looked up at him with a question in her eyes. “Did you get the graham crackers?”

“Yes,” he answered.

She moved toward him in her old slippers. He thought they looked like rabbits.