I wake from a night of sound sleep from which no dream images subsist, to the recollection of a small cartoon figure I’d doodled years and years ago. The creature in a human shape was entirely made of question marks. As in ????????, re-arranged into a kind of android. So, I start the day in a thicket of ????? from which I extract the following bit of living from yesterday.

Yesterday, when a small girl expressed a lot of sadness over the fact her schoolmates had made fun of her for her woeful performance as a reader. Woeful it was, as she demonstrated to me. So laborious was the process that I wasn’t even sure if she recognized individual letters in the alphabet. The room I use in that particular school is set up with various word games, so I pulled out the game of Scrabble. Together, we sorted through the letters and laid them out in alphabetical order. So far, so good, she recognized each and every one of them.

So we took the dreaded text about the big cat, the tiny mouse and The Case of the Disappearing Gruyère*. Started with the sentence Comment faire pour le découvrir? which she laid out, letter by letter, by looking at the model. Then read off on the table. Then read off on the page. We alternated – her turn, my turn. We’ll be doing more of this next week. Holding the individual letters in her hand seems to help in recognizing them individually and in laying them out in the correct order. We’ll see if this helps in her mastering The Art of Reading.

*No, the tiny mouse had not eaten the gruyère while the big cat snoozed. And the spider, the rats and the ants who claimed the tiny mouse must have eaten the gruyère because mice are like that – shifty, devious thieves to the last one? Were proven Wrong. In fact, as the big cat discovered with the tiny mouse’s help, the gruyère had feet. Well, let’s say the inhabitants in the gruyère had locomotive skills.

Not all mysteries find their resolution on the last page but there you have it: in this instance, Big Cat and Tiny Mouse shared the gruyère and its added content of protein and all was well that ended well.

(And no real animals were harmed in the writing of the tale.)

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On to whatever load of ???????? this current day contains. With so many from which to choose, I take on those questions I stand some chance of answering and leave the others in the hope I’ll make some sense of them later.

***

Plus: a lovely film that played at the local cinema on Monday: Jim Jarmusch’s Paterson. I won’t provide a spoiler but the parting Ah-Ha by the Japanese character at the end of the movie pretty much made my Monday a better experience overall. (In I Ching terms, I think that would be Hexagram 9 The Taming Power of the Small.)