visit, with cheesecake and books

Our nephew and niece from out of town were in town, on a rare visit, with their two daughters, aged 11 and 9. They suggested lunch with us, B. and myself, and they proposed the Cheesecake Factory in the big regional mall. We never go to the mall, but it's not far from us, so we said OK, and all was well until we got there. There were plenty of spaces in the garages, but the sheer number of cars trying to get in was causing huge backups at the ticket-dispensing machines. Time was pressing, so I found a way in around the lines, and then navigated a walking route through a large department store to the restaurant.

After ordering lunch, we asked the girls if they were still as big readers as they were when we last saw them some three years ago, and they were. "So," I said to their Mom, knowing her to be a bit of a Tolkien fan, "have you read them The Hobbit yet?" "Not yet," she said, "but soon." "Do you have a copy at home?" She looked at her husband with uncertainty. "I'm not sure."

"So here, have one," I said, reaching into my book bag and pulling out one of my extra hardcover copies. They were delighted. 9-year-old took it and, at Mom's suggestion, undertook to read the opening aloud. "In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit," she read. "Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-hole."

"And?" prompted Mom.

"That's all we're reading today," 9-year-old said decisively.

I then reached again into my magic book bag and pulled out one more book for each; favorites of ours and these stories, unlike The Hobbit, are about girls. For 9-year-old, Wren to the Rescue by Sherwood Smith; for 11-year-old, The Green Glass Sea by Ellen Klages. And we did not omit to mention that we know both authors personally. They were even more delighted. 11-year-old got particularly excited when I told her that her book is about a girl her age living at the lab where the atomic bomb was being built during World War II. She's specially interested in WW2, it appears, and it's gratifying to find a young person so interested in an event from 70 years before they were born.