2010
what’s the plan
maura @ 11:36 am
Gus has been reading the New Yorker lately, on occasion. It’s kind of hilarious even on the face of it: what could an 8 1/2 year old possibly get out of the New Yorker?
Like the adult-in-training that he is, Gus likes to read while sitting on the toilet. Usually it’s whatever book he’s in the middle of, but there’s also a pile of kid magazines in the bathroom: Ranger Rick and Discover Kids. Plus Jonathan gets MAKE magazine and that’s fun for the whole family.
We keep the magazines for grown-ups (the New Yorker, Entertainment Weekly and our college alumni magazine) in the bathroom next to our bedroom. But over the past week we’ve been doing a little home improvement* so that bathroom’s been out of commission. In the interim a couple of New Yorkers have migrated to the other bathroom.
* I may have mentioned before that we both hate and, in many cases (e.g. me + grout), are just not all that good at home improvement. But it seems like once every decade or so we have to test that theory again, poke it and prod it and make sure it still holds true. This time it was the ever-worsening bathroom sink drip that pushed us over the edge. It’s such a slippery slope: let’s replace the faucet. Heck, let’s replace the entire vanity — it’s 24 years old, definitely overdue. And while we’re at it, let’s take out the mirror and paint too! We’re almost done, and Jonathan did the lion’s share of the work, for which I am absurdly grateful. But I hope this is the last time I ever succumb to the fantasy that I should take on any home improvement tasks.
So last week Gus was in the bathroom, apparently reading the latest issue of the New Yorker. The cover is certainly attractive (and sad): a woman dropping her iphone into the pool, all orange and yellow and turquoise. After a few minutes I heard Gus flipping the pages, lingering briefly on each one, intoning: “boring. boring. boring…”
Then he asked us to bring him a marker. He found a cartoon without a caption, and he thought it was one of those cartoons on the last page, the caption contest (he asked a couple of times about what the prize is for the contest — I think he was hoping to win ca$h). Jonathan brought him a green marker and he went right to work. For those of you following along at home, the cartoon is on page 72, and Gus’s caption reads:
“I never knew this was a paper aircraft carrier”
THEN he flipped back to the cover and, um, augmented the cover image with a small turd near the lady’s behind. At which point it was clearly time for us to take the New Yorker away, trying hard to hide our giggles. We’ve saved out the cartoon, of course.
3 comments on “what’s the plan”
I know, right? That kid has a future!
That’s a pretty funny caption!!!
I used to enter that every week, then one day it was just too hard to come up with ANYthing at all and I couldn’t do it any more.