Kyra Moon

My daughter is watching an early episode of Paw Patrol. It is really sad to see Mayor Humdinger's decline: he began as someone whose greatest flaw was encouraging his basketball team to play dirty and gradually became the kind of person who got turned into a giant after helping an evil scientist and then attempted to squish everyone in his way.  Choices have consequences. Think about the sorry fate of Mayor Humdinger the next time you play basketball or race in a hot air balloon.

 I love driving around with my kids and seeing people's cute Halloween decorations. As for my own house, though, I haven't really put up much. Inside, I have exactly two (2) small decorations that are Halloween specific. It's just not a priority for me. However, yesterday I realized that our house is already Halloween-themed without any extra effort on my part. For example, we have: - Skeletons: baby teeth count as bones, right? The Tooth Fairy doesn't throw these away for some reason. - Banshee: electric pencil sharpener - Spiderwebs: we let the real spiders do these themselves. Last week I started mowing the lawn, stopped, and came back an hour later to see a newly-strung spiderweb on the lawn mower. Free decorations! - Ghosts: this month I have become very interested in learning about William Clayton and his in-laws, so they and their stories have taken up residence in multiple tabs of Google Chrome. I have been haunted by the awkwardness and angst in William's j...

I thought it would be fun doing a reader's theatre with my son, so I found a bunch of old radio scripts online. One of them was about Little Orphan Annie's surprise birthday party. The first half was a story about her friends hiding and surprising her followed by her opening presents. The second half was a very long ad from the announcer on how you could get the same birthday ring as her. Turns out the whole concept of YouTube videos where you can watch other kids open and play with toys isn't a modern phenomenon.

 As an 11-year-old, I already knew that the world was full of bad guys. The fractured fairy tales I would write with my sister and cousin were always full of villains doing dastardly deeds. So, to have bad guys do bad things seemed almost logical. Of course they would fly a plane into a building. Of course they would want to destroy America. Who would have expected otherwise? In some ways it wasn't surprising to suddenly be thrust into a story involving villains and evil terrorist groups. What was surprising was how shocked adults were about it. There were flags everywhere. There were so many newspaper articles. The teachers at my middle school in central New Jersey would talk about it all the time. They still couldn't believe something like that could happen here. It was as if they had forgotten how bad the world could be. Up until then, of course, I hadn't had too much exposure to bad events in the world. I vaguely remembered the Oklahoma City Bombing. I remembered Columb...

 

 "Gratitude and succor are modes of forgiveness. Gratitude is the work of forgiving things for being whatever good they are, rather than what I wanted them to be. Succor, in turn, is the work of forgiving things for needing from me the good that I am." -Adam Miller, "Original Grace"

I have been writing short essays about the Come, Follow Me topic for the past several weeks. If you are looking for something else to read, check these out! https://kyramoon.substack.com/