From this recent raid in the junk of my dad’s attic, I brought home the box of Star Wars action figures, the Millennium Falcon, and my two of the Shogun Warriors. (Dragun and Mazinga are my two, Godzilla and Raydeen are my brother’s.) The Falcon and Warriors, I’m giving to my boys.

I had to clean them up before handing them over, though, as they were covered in a dirty dust from around 30 years of being stored open in an attic. I gave both boys a wet paper towel and let them clean up their respective Shogun Warriors.

When I first showed the boys their new toys, Calfgrit8 immediately jumped to picking which he wanted. Calfgrit4 had a sad face as he looked at the unpicked one, “I have to take the serious one,” he said with a pathetic frown.

Both Warriors have robotic faces, but Mazinga (the one CG8 initially picked) has a big metallic grin, and Dragun (the “serious” one) has a simple frown-like expression.

CG8 is always jumping first to claim a toy over CG4. This presumptuousness combined with CG4’s disappointed eyes made me say, “Wait, wait. I was going to give Mazinga to CG4 because he’s mostly blue (his favorite color), and Dragun to you, CG8, because he’s red (your favorite color).”

CG8 paused a moment, but he took the suggestion. CG4 burst into a grin as big as Mazinga’s and ran to grab up his new toy.

While the boys cleaned up their robots, I set about cleaning the Millennium Falcon. I tried just wiping it down with a wet paper towel, but good lord it was dirty. And all the nooks and crannies of the ship made wiping it only half effective. I eventually had to actually take it apart, removing all the screws and carefully removing the top.

I filled the bathtub with water and soap, and let the ship soak while we ate dinner. You can see in the picture how dirty it was compared to the white of the bathtub.

I did eventually get it mostly beige instead of dirty tan. I dried it off with a hairdryer, but I have to glue back some broken pieces — 30 years in a non-temperature-controlled attic made some of the smaller plastic pieces brittle.

Watching me wash the Falcon off like this prompted Calfgrit4 to want to wash the little spaceship brain from Mazinga’s head. He filled the bathroom sink with water and soap, and cleaned that little red spaceship to sparkling.

After dinner, the boys played with their new robots toys and seemed to be having a real ball. They’re very anxious to include the Falcon in their play, but they’ll have to wait till at least tonight for me to get it all back together.

* * *

This morning, Calfgrit4 came out of his bedroom carrying his new-old Shogun Warrior. It’s almost two-thirds his height. It stands on the floor next to his chair as he eats breakfast.

Bullgrit

Some things from the mind & mouth of Calfgrit4:

“Mommy, guess what this dinosaur eats. Blood!”

“How did God make himself?”

“Good guys rule. Bad guys fart.”

“Can I go outside and check on my pet worm?”

“I’m starving! I’m very hungry. No, I don’t want apples, I want crackers. I want crackers ’cause I’m very hungry.”

Bullgrit

We’re still reading The Hobbit each night before bedtime, and although Calfgrit4 has lost all interest in it (it’s a little too complicated for a 4-year-old to keep up with), Calfgrit8 is totally into the story; he looks forward to us reading more of the book each night.

Now that I’ve read some more of it aloud, it’s getting a bit easier. But it’s still a very complicated out-loud read. The archaic language and very long sentences almost become tongue twisters.

We’ve reached the point in the story where Bilbo has escaped Gollum and the goblin caves, with the help of the magic ring, and has just met back up with Gandalf and the dwarves. I really got into the character of Gollum, reading his lines with the appropriately sinister voice. But the riddle game was a bunch of gibberish to me, and I can’t imagine that CG8 got any of that stuff. He listened closely because of the tense situation (Gollum threatening to eat Bilbo), but I think a lot of the text was over his head -– heck, some of the riddles were nonsense to me. (But I’m generally not very good with riddles, anyway.)

As I was reading the last pages of the chapter about Bilbo’s encounter with Gollum, I remembered I have an illustrated hardcover version of The Hobbit – I had forgotten about it for years. (We’ve been reading from a non-illustrated trade paperback.) I pulled it off the shelf in the den and showed CG8 the illustrations of the all the main characters as well as the trolls, the goblins, and Gollum. “Gollum doesn’t look like what I thought,” he said. I was taken aback at that comment. I worried whether I should have left Gollum’s image up to his own imagination.

I first read The Hobbit for myself after seeing the old Rankin/Bass animated film, so I had a completely different image in my mind of Gollum when I read the book. The 1977-film Gollum looked like a frog-creature. The illustrated-book Gollum looks more like the 2000s-film version: a twisted, nasty hobbit. I wish I had asked CG8 how he pictured Gollum in his mind before showing him a picture. And maybe I shouldn’t have shown him a picture at all. This is going to bug me for a while.

CG8 was excited to learn that the ring Bilbo found turned him invisible. His excitement showed when he told his momma about the magic of the ring, “It made him invisible! No one could see him!”

He’s interested in Gandalf and Thorin as much as Bilbo; their magic swords, Goblin-cleaver and Foe-hammer, have captured his imagination almost as much as the ring. He knows Bilbo’s knife is magic, too — I’ve told him Bilbo will eventually name it Sting –- but it hasn’t done anything other than glow a little bit.

Middle-Earth hasn’t replaced the Star Wars galaxy as Calfgrit8’s preferred imaginary play place, but he’s definitely loving the story. I’m just glad that my mediocre verbal skills aren’t mangling Tolkien’s elaborate prose beyond enjoyment for either of us.

Bullgrit

Every night before bed, I (or Cowgrit) read books to our boys. Each boy picks out what they want me to read, and we settle down in my and Cowgrit’s bed, with me in the middle and a boy on either side. The choices of what to read range from a comic book to a kids encyclopedia — whatever they want. Often I also get Calfgrit8 to read to us.

A couple weeks ago, I offered to read J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit (or There And Back Again). It’s been a couple and a half of decades since I read this book — back in early high school — so although I remember the story pretty well, I had forgotten the actual text.

I remembered that The Lord of the Rings was dense with archaic language, (as I’ve read bits and pieces of those books in the last ten years), but The Hobbit is supposed to be a children’s book. Although I don’t remember having trouble reading it as a teenager, and I can read it in my head easily enough, reading it aloud is very different. I think I sound like Mushmouth of Fat Albert’s gang. Maybe it’s my Southern accent; reading Old English with a Southern drawl.

The story is a lot of fun, and Calfgrit8 is enjoying it immensely, despite my mangling of the language. Before starting it, to get his interest, I told him the book was about a hobbit, a group of dwarves, and a wizard — I had to explain what a hobbit is — on a journey to recover the dwarves’ home and gold from an evil dragon. I told him they would encounter trolls, elves, goblins, giant spiders, and a strange creature called Gollum.

So far we’re only up to the group’s arrival in Rivendell. I have a bookmark that folds out to show a map of Middle-Earth, and we keep checking it to track their journey through the lands.

When I suggested I read this book to him, I didn’t realize just how difficult it would be to read aloud. Had I remembered, or had I checked before mentioning it, I don’t know if I would have agreed to read it each night. I might have just waited till he was older and could read it on his own. Even if I’m not ruining the story with my reading aloud, there’re lots of words I’m sure he doesn’t understand yet.

But he’s still showing interest, and he said tonight he wants us to read it every night until we finish it. So I guess I’m doing something right.

Bullgrit