The Everlasting Story of Nory

34. Things to Rem

So those were the basic questions that Nory wanted to ask Mr. Pears but couldn’t, and instead of asking them, she finished her book about the hen who wouldn’t give up. She wrote down on her Readathon sheet that she’d finished the book, and she saw her plain old ruler in her pencil case, which was made of plain clear and red plastic, and she listed through all the fancy rulers she had back in Palo Alto. She had a whole collection — two Lisa Frank rulers, a Pompeii ruler, a Little Mermaid ruler, a ruler that had liquid in it that fishes slowly swam through, and the Hello Kitty rulers from the Sanrio store in Japan Center, and on and on, maybe twenty feet worth of rulers, and all of that was plus a whole separate collection of erasers. Maybe this wasn’t quite as good as having a collection of fake food but it was something that Nory thought she should really be more pleased about. She kept her erasers in a blue icecube tray, not in the freezer of course, but it was a way of keeping them neatly in place, one eraser per ice place.

One time she was trying to earn some money to buy Underwater Barbie. Underwater Barbie, as many may know, kicked her legs in the bathtub. It was pretty good when she got it although the problem with it was that its motor made a massive amount of noise, so you couldn’t tell a story about something that happened to Underwater Barbie while you had her kicking gently along under the water, which was what ahead of time Nory expected she would be doing. But she was really desperate for Underwater Barbie, and she had almost enough, and to earn the last bit of money she did a lot of different things. One of them was to set up a poster-making store with different styles of lettering for sale and different kinds of pictures to go along with them, but the customers, who were of course Nory’s mother and father, mainly, chose what they wanted it to be a poster of. Nory’s father asked for a poster of five important sayings or mottoes, which could be sayings or mottoes that other people had said or sayings that Nory herself said. So Nory wrote a poster titled ‘Things to Rem.’ She ran out of space for the rest of Remember so she made a thought-cloud and had the Rem remembering the ember part as if it was a contented memory. She only charged for ten headline letters because of that mess-up — three cents for each letter. The sayings were:

A Home Made Gift is Worth More than a Pot of Gold

Things May Not Be How You Rember Them

Things That You Take for Granted others May Treasure

Some Thing That you Think is Good

Another pearson Will think is bad

She only did four sayings, not five, because she was almost out of room and couldn’t think of any more, but Nory’s father liked the poster and wanted to pay extra for the border design but Nory said that was included free, and the total was 84 cents for the sayings at 2 cents per word and 30 cents for the headline, which came to $1.14. The saying Nory liked best was ‘Things That You Take for Granted others May Treasure’ because that might be true of something like her eraser collection or her ruler collection, especially her ruler collection, which even she took for granted up to now and didn’t even bother to think of as a collection except that now at the Junior School she only had this one plain red ruler that said, ‘Helix.’ Rulers were useful for drawing the cubicles of a cartoon properly.

Nory drew a face on her fingernail and then smeared it away, trying to figure out how you would draw a cartoon picture of a girl thinking about clouds. You’d have to draw the thought-cloud with the usual three puffs leading promptly down from it to the girl’s head, and then in the cloud you’d draw a cloud, and you’d have to shade the background of the thought-cloud with a different color, maybe, to draw the clear distinction between it and the real cloud that the girl was thinking about — but anything’s possible with a pencil and paper, just about. Nory had in general two favorite types of clouds. One was the low flat steamy gray ones that you can walk right up to, and the other kind was the fat puffy ones that seem to have no end.