FOX PAWS @ ALA

So I'm standing in line on the Exhibit floor at ALA waiting to get Jon Scieszka (rhymes with Fresca) & Lane Smith (eek, a no show that day) to sign some books for my son, chatting with my fellow literary queue prisoners about this and that, the "this" being which books are must, must reads and the "that" being grumbles about how hungry we were and how we could not wait for them to cut that Charm City cake so we could find out how $1,000+ baked goods taste, when I accidentally committed a bit of a faux pas.

Wow, long sentence there, sorry.

You see there was this terribly cute little girl a bit behind me in line and she had been conversing with another equally cute if not quite so adorable young lady about siblings, blogging and which booths were giving out the best rubber band bracelets. After a bit, the cute but not quite as adorable girl wandered off, perhaps to try her hand at Wei bowling at the Demco exhibit, (Yes, it's hard work to attend these conventions but we struggle on due to professional pride.) and the first girl's mother had excused herself for some reason leaving her to hold their spot in line. Good mother and concerned citizen that I am I decided to engage the poor tyke in conversation so she would not feel so lost and alone.

I noticed from her badge that she was from Indiana, my mother's people hale from there, so I had my opening. She politely let me natter at her about such Hosier topics as Lew Wallace, IN being the frozen dessert capital of the world, breaded pork tenderloin, and crinoid hunting. Then mentioned she had a blog which specialized in children's literature. I clucked over her and said how clever then asked if her mum was a children's librarian (OK, perhaps I wasn't that patronizing but in retrospect it feels this way).

No, she said, she was the librarian and her 'clever' little blog had been featured on national television averaging several thousand hits per day. In fact, she informed me tapping her all access, purple beribboned badge, she had been flown our here as a guest speaker for the convention.

Well, what could I do?

I asked for her autograph and quickly pretended to become engrossed in my ALA progrm.

All kidding aside, she was quite nice and very gracious about the whole thing. Obviously, I wasn't the first adult to underestimate her that day. So when my son, who is also precocious and often too smart for his own good, asked me if we could start a blog together so he could write down his impressions of books that he is reading I had no choice but to dedicate the first posting of this endever to the brainy tyke who gently took me down a peg or two at ALA and reminded me never to underestimate the vertically challenged.

They will, after all, be taller than us and running the world sooner than we think.