January 2
At 7:46 this morning my eyeballs were practically popping out of their lids from tiredness and all I wanted to do was laze about for 23 or more minutes under my pink dotty bedspread in my all-red room and practice my stretching in case it might make me get taller, which I need because there's a lot of shortness in my family, includingme. Then I remembered about today and I got up so fast that if you saw me your head would spin.
I have never actually seen a spinning head but my grandmother, who's called Madam, says that whenever someone is speedy in the extreme, which I am just about all the time.
But my friend Adam Melon, who actually likes it when I call him Melonhead, which is lucky because that is all I ever do call him, says necks can't twist that far. I say probably some necks can under circumstances because Madam is not one who makes up stuff, plus she's the writer of a newspaper column that's absolutely full of directions for parents and is completely nonfiction.
So Melonhead and I have to have pretty many discussions about headspinning. The last time, he got the look of being exasperated with me, which is the same as being a little fed up, and he said, "Think about it, Lucy Rose. We're 9 years old. I used to live in Florida and you used to live in Michigan and we've been all over Washington, D.C., and Capitol Hill. We've evenbeen to Maryland and Virginia but we've NEVER seen 1 single spinning head."
"I have on TV," I said.
"That's fake," he said. "Think about it."
I did think about it and what I thought was that he is right but I did not admit it because the thing about Melonhead is that, even though I feel a LITTLE fond of him, he's the sort who acts like he knows everything in this world, which is the exact kind of carrying-on that made me call him Melonhead in the first place. Also it's the reason that sometimes my ultra-best friend, Jonique, and I feel like we want to give him a sharp poke. Only we don't because when you are in 4th grade like we are, that behavior is called NOT APPROPRIATE.
If you do poke a person, even if it's a soft poke that hardly hurts, you get sent to Mr. Pitt's office that smells like old lunch and has posters about TEAMWORK and RESPECTING OTHERS. Then you have to listen to Mr. Pitt talk his head off until your ears go buzzy on the inside, and if you watch his beard go up and down, you could probably get hypnotized.
Plus those chats of his are so utterly dull that if the poking people were allowed to pick their consequences, which they certainly are not, they'd take getting squashed by Ashley, who is the snarkiest girl alive, over hearing 16 seconds more of Mr. Pitt talking about being a PEACEKEEPER who uses her SELF-CONTROL.
I know this from my personal experience.
That's what I was thinking about while I was brushing my teeth with my automatic toothbrush that came from my Glamma that lives in AnnArbor and is shaped like a penguin. I mean the toothbrush, not my Glamma, who is only a little bit penguin-shaped, mostly around her stomach. At the same exact time I was thinking and brushing, I was also trying to make my head spin. My mom calls that multi-tasking, which is doing 2 or 3 things at once. Sometimes I do 5.
When my teeth were shined, I skied down the hall on my pink fuzz socks. That was to save my energy. Then I crash-landed in my mom's bedroom that looks utterly deluxe ever since she painted it the color of scrambled eggs, and I started singing at the tip-top of my lungs, "You gotta GET UP in the mornin'," until she finally did.
My mom rushed and brushed her teeth and I made the recommendation that she brush her hair at the same time for speediness. Then she hopped into her black yoga pants and purple sweatshirt. I was already wearing my orange shirt with blue fish on it and my green pants that have pink roses climbing up their legs. I wore my red cowgirl boots because I always do. Then my mom said, "Find the snowflake sweater Daddy gave you because . . ."
"Because 'Baby, it's cold outside,' " I sang, which is an activity that I have to do every minute because I'm practicing for when I'm a star on Broadway.
"It's also a long walk to 7th Street," my mom said. "So stop writing and let's shake a leg."
"I am leg-shaking," I said. "But I'm bringing this new red velvet writing book with us because 1. I might think of a thing I have to write down and 2. Of all the booksPop ever gave me, this one is the absolute smoothiest and is a comfort to my hands."
Same exact day, only it's 9:16 AM in the morning
My mom and I dashed ourselves over to Constitution Avenue to pick up my grandparents, who were bundled and waving their arms off at us.
"Good morning, Lily," Pop called out to my mom.
"Hello, Old Sock," Madam said to me.
When she calls me Old Sock she means it in the complimenting way.
We walked fast, only whenever I saw giant snow clumps we had to stop so I could climb up and get a view of the distance.
Melonhead was already at 7th Street, jumping around in front of the store that used to be Capitol Plumbing and stabbing the awning with a stick to jiggle the snow on top. Awning is the 2nd-newest word in my vocabulary collection that's called WOTD for Word Of The Day. It's the name of those puny tents that stick out in front of windows, which is a look I admire on stores but not so much on houses.
 

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Excerpted from Working Myself to Pieces and Bits by Katy Kelly
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