Taking one’s igloos for a spin …

Now that all the local high schools have graduated, I can safely tell the saga of a friend’s teenage daughter who has a serious future in spin. In fact, if I were a political organization, I’d be signing her up now.

I happened to be visiting her mother when the daughter arrived home in a panic at five o’clock after a sports practice to announce that a project she thought was due in “a few months” was in fact due the next day. The assignment was to make either a diorama or a flat board depiction of “my ideal life.” But daughter also had a “super important” history test the next day. “Please, mom,” she says, “Can you help me?” Both parties were clear what “help” meant.

Let Inga Tell You. Look for La Jolla resident Inga's lighthearted looks at life every other week in The La Jolla Light.

Let me interject here that there is not a mom in America who has not been put in this position in some form or another, even if it’s the 10 p.m. announcement that three dozen cookies are required for the school bake sale the next day. Fortunately, my friend was a pro at school projects, to the envy (and abject jealousy) of all her friends, including me.

The Plaster of Paris topography map of central Asia was to scale, the science fair board sparkled in glitter paper wonder, the Christmas diorama sported a battery-operated fireplace and a yuletide soundtrack, and the oral report on Colonial America was delivered via two hand-made museum-quality puppets of George and Martha Washington. Fortuitously, she had a virtual warehouse of her kids’ former projects carefully stored in the garage. A local gallery should do a retrospective.

Surveying the arsenal of possibilities, she asks her daughter a question that in my mind should be immortalized: “So, do you care what your ideal life looks like?” And daughter says, “Nope.” Mom pulls out a board that one of her sons did in the second grade, exact topic no longer obvious. But it has a bunch of Styrofoam igloos glued to it with a lot of white snow around them. Hard to imagine that a La Jolla born-and-bred child’s ideal life would include living in an igloo and eating whale blubber with no Burger Lounge in sight.

Daughter has to admit that the accompanying paragraph — yes! they did actually have to create prose! — was going to be a tough sell. So she suggests that mom could maybe scrape off the snow in one corner and add some sand for a beach. She ponders this a bit more and adds brightly, “I could say that I like contrasts! My ideal life is about contrasts!” As I said, the young lady definitely has a future in politics.

While daughter goes upstairs to wax poetic about contrasts, mom dutifully sets about making little palm trees out of pipe cleaners and green construction paper to stick into the sand to make it look appropriately beachy. Et voilà! Or not.

Just in time, mom notices that in large block letters on the bottom of the board is the name of her older son and the notation “Grade 2.” Mom sets a land speed record getting a can of black spray paint at Meanley’s in the 10 minutes before it closes.

One could always make the argument that one was re-using just the wooden board from a long-ago project, but I like to think that any teacher worth her salt would be a tad suspicious about the remarkable coincidence of the “second grade” ID on the bottom in combination with the igloos. At least I hope she would. But then, this is a teacher who assigned dioramas as a term project for a high school Advanced English class.

Ironically, the project they ended up doing would have made an excellent assignment: Take a previous project and give it an entirely different conclusion. Anymore, we live in a world of spin. Never too early to develop the skill.

By the way, grade on this project? B+. One of the highest grades in the class. The teacher also gave daughter an excellent recommendation for college. Where, I’m hoping, the diorama and flat board projects are in the daughter’s academic past. But if not, have I got a garage for her.

Related posts:

1. Let Inga Tell You: Finding ourselves loo-less in La Jolla
2. Let Inga Tell You: Here’s why Internet posters don’t spell too good
3. Let Inga Tell You: Changing our décor gave me the shutters
4. Let Inga Tell You: The Curse of the Upscale Address strikes again!
5. Let Inga Tell You: He’ll be home for Christmas (or else) !

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Posted by Staff on Jun 14, 2011. Filed under Columns, Editorial Columns, Let Inga Tell You. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry