The six-year-old mind of Karen McGill obeys no clear chronology.
My friend Jennie keeps her grocery list on her phone so she can add to it whenever a need comes up — she finishes off the hand soap refill bottle, etc. But I’m going a different way.
In an effort to encourage paper and pencil over electronics, I’ve pinned my shopping list to the fridge and invited everyone in the house to add their requests throughout the week.
Results have been mixed.
The first three days, nobody contributed to the list but me, despite my lengthy introductory remarks about its use and potential. I jotted *apples*, *oat ’n’ honey bars*, *string cheese*. I jotted *milk* even though it’s a given, the first thing I drop into my cart every shopping trip.
The fourth day, I got home from Boody Burn Boot Camp and was delighted to find an entry that hadn’t been there before I’d left.
*creamed corn*
Not an item I typically buy, but alright. If somebody was using my system as intended and wanted creamed corn, then creamed corn they would get.
I ran #Karen to dance class. I stopped by the county clerk’s office to pull court documents for a McGill Investigators case involving some disputed tree work. (Neighbor A liked the tree, Neighbor B — whose yard contained 55% of the trunk — didn’t.)
When I got back, another entry had been added.
*creamed corn*
Over the next two days, the number of *creamed corn* entries grew to seven. I finally asked Granny about it.
“Aw, did I put that down already?” she said, her deep-sunk eyes pinching at the list.
I showed her the duplicates.
She insisted, “That’s not my handwriting. Must’ve been the rugrats.”
I explained that Karen didn’t know cursive and Zach, the last time he’d been served creamed corn, had said, “Yeah, Mom, I actually didn’t order blown chunks.”
Granny made no comment on this, and said to buy a whole bunch if it was on special.
The following day, I renewed my request for items to the kiddos. My packed lunches were getting monotonous and coming back half or a third eaten from school. I was wide-open to suggestions.
Karen marched stoutly to the fridge in the afternoon and scrawled, *Zippylocky bags.*
“Great!” I said and, checking the bags drawer, found we actually were out of the snack and sandwich sizes.
It wouldn’t help with lunch, but it was absolutely a successful use of the system.
Fourteen-year-old #Zach remained obdurate. His sole contribution was to turn all the o’s into gory eyeballs, sketching in menacing lids and dripping blood.
I asked, “Have you thought any more about art camp?”
He made a fizzing sound with his lips.
“So I’m about to hit the store,” I said. “If you don’t put anything down, you’re stuck with PB&J and apple slices all week.”
“I want Lunchables,” he said. “And Sprite. Reggie brings a can of Sprite for lunch.”
“Well, write that down.”
He added, *Sprite* and *Lunchables (prefer mini-hot dog ones)*.
I nodded cheerily at the entries, replaced the pen in its sleeve, and said, “You aren’t getting either. But thank you for using the system.”
He left to go skateboard, muttering about my lameness.
I gathered my purse and reusable bags from the coat closet, and tore the grocery list off its pad, exposing a fresh sheet.
In the living room, Granny was watching a judge show.
I asked her, “You’ll keep an eye on them?”
She waved her purple-veined hand dismissively. “Don’t buy the store brand. It’s not real cream. They use formaldehyde.”
I pledged not to.
Heading outside, I encountered Karen playing stuffed animals on the porch. Arrayed before a line of her twenty-odd favorites were baggies of gravel.
“Karen, honey,” I said. “What’s the story with the gravel?”
I’d bought fifty pounds of the stuff last year to fill in a trough woodchucks made near the foundation. It wasn’t cheap.
“The stuffies are doing sets!” she said.
“Sets? Like you practice in kindergarten?”
She nodded proudly. “And they’re getting really good at it.” Animating Froggy’s arms with her own hands, she raised his baggie of gravel. The stuffed frog’s black-marble eyes looked thoughtful, as though he were counting.
“I can see that.” I was doing my own counting, figuring up the cost of this playacting. “You couldn’t have demonstrated with a single bag?”
Karen looked at me like I’d just proposed we sleep on the roof.
I continued, “Okay, I’m off. Find Granny if you need something.”
Karen said she would.
I’d almost reached my car when she called, “Mommy, I thought of one more!”
I turned, mustering an attentive smile.
“We’re kind of low on toothpicks too,” she said. “You might wanna get more.”
I didn’t even ask.
I wasn’t sure how I felt about #Karen making a temperature screener for her stuffed animals from old cardboard.
“They have to get checked for fever!” she explained. “Some of their parents are bad and shove ’em on the bus sick.”
That phrase — “shove ’em on the bus sick” — was of course Granny’s.
“I think if they register a fever, most likely their parents just didn’t notice,” I said, turning my palms up sunnily.
But Karen disagreed. “Parents aren’t *dumb*, they know what they’re doing.”
More Granny.
I decided it wasn’t the right time for a course correction. Karen had dance class in forty minutes, and I needed to get a pork loin in the oven before we left. I’d had aspirations of doing a marinade at one point, but those were long gone now.
“You’ve done an excellent job, it’s so realistic,” I said of the scanner, which had a crayon-drawn green to red scale along its top. “Should we send a few stuffies through?”
Karen clapped and sat forward over her knees.
First I walked Blue Elephant through, compressing his head and trunk to fit. Karen made a bright “Pling!” noise.
Dora and Cousin Bear went next. They both got plings too. But when I sent Frog-Frog through, Karen snarled, “Bzzzzt.”
I turned with genuine alarm. It’d been a nasty noise.
“101.3!” Karen reported. “Frog-Frog goes to the quarantine room!”
“Quarantine room?” I said.
She nodded severely. “Now Frog-Frog has to sit and keep his mask on and wait for his mom to come bail him out.”
“Or dad,” I said.
Karen shrugged off the suggestion and crammed Frog-Frog unceremoniously into a repurposed Tazo tea tin. I have to say, I wasn’t loving the authoritarian vibe.
“Sweetie,” I said. “All any of the stuffies want is to see their friends and teachers at school. What would you say to checking Frog-Frog again in a few minutes? Maybe he just got off his bike. Maybe he was pedaling super hard and got overheated.”
Karen exhaled at length.
“I *guess*.” She pulled Frog-Frog reluctantly from the Tazo tin. “But his parents should’ve thought of that.”
I left to preheat the oven, buying time to come up with another answer.
#Karen is excited about school starting in September — big first grader!
“I can’t wait for hybrid,” she told us yesterday afternoon. “We ride in a hybrid Prius and now I’ll go to hybrid school.”
Zach looked up crookedly from the Algebra worksheet I’d forced on him.
I smiled at my daughter’s enthusiasm.
“That’s right,” I said, then gingerly, “Honey, what are you expecting hybrid school to be like?”
Karen gazed outside with a dreamy expression. “Mrs. Gupta is going to run the school half gas and half electric. That way we save energy for fighting the Covid!”
Mrs. Gupta is our principal.
Zach had a risking smirk and was squaring up an answer, but I beat him to the punch.
“We do all need our energy,” I said. “But I think Mrs. Gupta is also having you study at home some days. Like before.”
Karen set down the doll she was playing with, stumped. “Like Zoom? Like with Mr. Overton this summer?”
“Not … quite.” Last time I’d seen Ed Overton, he’d been wedging Capri Suns into a cooler packed solid with Bud Light cans, packing for an all-day float trip. “It’ll be better, Honey. Mrs. Gupta will have the kinks worked out this time around.”
*I hoped.*
The answer satisfied Karen. She resumed styling her doll’s hair.
“Hybrid’s gonna be fun,” she said. Then, leaning past the doll so it couldn’t hear: “I bet it’ll get super quiet when we switch into electric mode.”
Inspired by the social distancing circles some public parks are implementing, Karen has begun spacing out her Barbies and stuffies.
It's taking a toll on my masking tape supply.
"Karen, so ..." I said, casting my eyes about the living room floor. "Could we possibly find a more renewable way to create spacing?"
At first, Karen seemed to take offense and reared back clutching Purple Elephant. Then she squinted at me.
"It *is* renewable!" She frumped her lip. "We have a whole 'nother roll of tape in the art drawer."
I looked at her dolls in their squished-limb poses, each meticulously inside its masking tape boundary. Karen had even made masks of scrap paper and hair ties.
Oh, well. I'll be extra careful flipping off lights for the next two weeks. #karensWorld