peekaboo

What. What.

You thought I was ending taotechu? Guess I fooled, well, us -- all 54 of us, or the 5 that are still listening.

Which reminds me of a story. Last week, Laura was trying to figure out how big a turkey you need to get in order to feed the crowd we are hosting on Thanksgiving. She found her way to a website that had a little trivia quiz. "How many Pilgrims were at the first Thanksgiving?" it asks. She reads the question to me at the breakfast table. "Hey, let's guess," she says. We each take a few seconds. "Gee, I dunno," I say. "Could be like 100. Or maybe 12."

I'm breaking walnuts and sprinkling them over my Grape Nuts. She is staring at the screen. "How about 43?" I say between bites. "43," she types in.
"What's the real answer?" I ask.
"Huh. It doesn't say," she says, searching the site. "Oh, here it is. 43! Oh. That's us. Huh."

It turns out she was on a page asking for an expert answer to someone's sincere question. Some kid typed in her homework question, waited for the answer, and then put our stab-in-the-dark response into her little essay. It's somewhere out on the web, and other kids in other Novembers will no doubt have the same question asked of them: "How many Pilgrims were at the first Thanksgiving?" They'll be pleased to so easily find our definitive, authoritative-sounding "43." They'll write that down and hand it in.

This is how history is formed and recorded.

Mind you, it is only now, as I take a picture of our pronouncement, that I see that the question is about "pilgrams." I like to think that would have tipped me off.

Now I can't figure out how to segue back to the entry I intended to make about all the broken trees the storm left behind.

I will post this and see if anyone is still here with me. Then, I want to say something about broken trees.
And about cancer, too.