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MARK: Today I had help from Lucy, age 8, with today’s update. I asked her to talk about our stays in Bryan and Austin, TX while I typed what she said. Full disclosure – I took what she said and changed the order of some sentences so that it goes in chronological order. Otherwise, though, this is what she said. Her comments are in the larger font.

LUCY: When we came into Texas, we were listening to a song named "After Breakfast Let’s Go to Texas.” My mom and dad are in a band that’s called the Church Ladies and it's their song.

We went to Bryan, Texas and stayed with Petey, my mom’s friend. Petey is a really nice man. We walked around Texas A and M. It was really hot out and I liked it a lot. Petey told us about butterflies and Texas Rangers and trees.



MARK: For the Texas A&M football team, there is great importance given to "The Twelveth Man." Here's Karen with her hand on the thigh of that hallowed player.



Also, in Bryan we finally got our antenna fixed! Yay! Here's a picture with Daniel from the Honda dealer.  Such a nice guy!



LUCY: We went to a restaurant. It was my dad’s birthday. It was a Mexican restaurant and I tried Sopapillas and I loved them. In the Sopapillas we put a candle and sang Happy Birthday to my dad.



Another day we went to Aunt Pat and Uncle Frank’s house in Austin, Texas. We saw Suzanne and Stephen my second cousins and Francesco, which is a baby, my new cousin. Francesco was 3 months old when I met him. He was really cute. I love the way that he holded on to my finger.

MARK: Here's Zoe with lovely Francesco, and then my family:



MARK: While we were at in Austin, Lucy decided to play with my aunt’s weight set and promptly dropped a 5lb weight hard on her left ring finger. It then proceeded to turn purple and swell up. It’s still purple and swelled, but a bit better now. And she can move it around, so we’ve decided it must be okay. Yet another adventure with Lucy.

(I have a picture of Lucy's finger but Karen seems to have hidden the camera and she's asleep right now -- the nerve! -- so I can't download it.  But I'll put it up here soon)

LUCY: We went to lots of bookstores and me and Zoe got these little stuffed animals and my brother got a hat. We went in the kids section and played with the trains.



MARK: We loved the beautiful state capital building -- where we arrived just in time for an amazing tour. And we remembered the Alamo...



We visited an amazing independent bookstore in Autsin called Book People. They were very kind to us!


At a Barnes and Noble in Austin we had an unlikely encounter too strange for fiction: I was standing there talking with a bookseller when I heard a woman’s voice behind me say, “Mark? Mark Hughes, is that you?” I turned around and there, out of the blue, stood a familiar face from Rhode Island. Beverly Pettine is a friend of the family who used to work with my mother. Beverly doesn’t live down here in Texas--it was just a strange coincidence that she just happened to be visiting her sister in Austin (who knew?) and just happened to be in exactly the right the bookstore with her sister and niece when she saw a sign announcing that I was going to be appearing here. She looked at the time and my appearance just happened to be exactly when she was here. If I were to put that in a story, no one would believe it. Yet, here’s the proof: Here I am with Beverly in front of our car in Austin, TX, of all places. Whoda thunk? :-)

 

We also had a very nice afternoon with friends of friends. Our neighbor, Jay, grew up in the Dallas area so we were very pleased to meet Brad, Holly, Katie, and Grace, who live in Austin. Lovely people and our new friends in Texas. :-)



LUCY: Yesterday we went to Stephen and Jonathan’s house and they have five dogs. Their names were Max, Casey, Billy, Toby, and Lloyd. They were cute. I loved to pick Max up. He was the littlest but he was 31 years old. We went in Stephen and Jonathan’s pool and swam. Stephen and my dad and mom threw us in. It was really fun.

Right now my brother and sister are filling their stomachs with Cheetos. We’re driving to Dallas, Texas. We’re going to stay with Gigi. We were just listening to High School Musical in the car.

MARK: A sad note: I just got some terribly disappointing news from NPR – they are not going to air the road-trip stories after all. Given their already busy line up and the fact that the producer working with me will be away in Alaska for a month starting this week, they made their decision not to go forward with the road-trip stories. I can’t tell you how disappointed I am about this. I sent out the message about NPRs decision earlier this morning and was truly touched by the many, many the kind emails people sent in reply. I’m grateful to have such a supportive network.

On the other hand, I’ve already learned a great deal from working with NPR so far, and the experience has been a lot of fun. Perhaps after the summer is over I’ll submit some commentaries in the style of the first one, where I talked about quitting my job. We’ll see.

In any case, this is so far the only significant set-back in an otherwise successful and happy road trip/book tour. And I’m determined to get over it before we reach Dallas. :-)

I appreciate your friendship.
-- Mark

LEMONADE MOUTH (Delacorte Press, 2007)
I AM THE WALLPAPER (Delacorte Press, 2005)
www.markpeterhughes.com

Earlier this year while deciding which DVD to rent at the video store here on Cobb Mountain, I watched a family out of the corner of my eye while they were making their decision.

Dad and Mom, a boy about ten, and a younger boy who was probably five or six, wandered in and out of the rows. I think what caught my attention was the affection the parents had for their boys. To my surprise, the movie they decided to watch (family consensus) was SAW 2.

The day before I'd taught a writing lesson to first graders. The objective was to write using sensory details. The classroom teacher suggested that the students write about a dream they'd had. One child volunteered that Chucky was in his dream, and then one child after another talked about Chucky showing up in theirs. Chucky's one busy boogeyman. I asked the class how many of them had watched a movie with Chucky in it.

All but one or two kids raised their hands; even the sweetest little girls who usually wrote about rainbows and ponies were enthusiastically waving, wanting to share their favorite scenes.
I don't have children, but I have a feeling I'd be "old fashioned" about what I'd let my six year old watch.

At the video store, this was on my mind as I watched the family happily leave with SAW 2 tucked under the eldest son's arm. I rarely speak my mind in public, but maybe because the lesson was had just happened, I made a comment to the owner of the store about the purchase.

A man standing behind me overheard and asked, "How old is old enough for kids to watch horror?"

Taken off guard, I said, "I don't know. Twelve?" (If I had had my wits about me, I'd probably have said an older age.)

He stepped forward and pointed his finger at me, "You're saying my 11 year old isn't old enough to watch Saw 2?"

I told him my story about the first graders, and he then asked me,"But weren't they giggling?"

At this point I was almost in tears, but I managed to sputter, "Yes, they were . . ."

In a louder voice, the man asked, "And so what's wrong with it?"

I tried to say that I felt kids are growing up too fast, that I wanted them to be innocent for as long as possible, that I hated for kids to become inured to violence, having graphic violence implanted in their brains from the time they're born, and how hard it has been at times to get certain students to write something that doesn't come canned out of a movie script with heads blowing off right and left. I wanted to tell him about my worries about our society becoming desensitised to violence. I wanted to site studies about how video games have been linked to acts of violence among young men, and the anger and dread I felt when I read about how players get more points in Grand Theft Auto from shooting prostitutes after raping them.

I was flustered and couldn't talk. I managed to pay for my movie and got out of there. Then driving home, I thought about HUNGRY. Okay, here I was upset about SAW 2 and Chucky inhabiting the dreams of first graders. . . and what had I written? Deborah and her family eat people, for goodness sakes! Does the humor justify the violence in the book?

When I was writing the novel, I didn't take the Jones family dietary habits seriously because of the humor, and I didn't think anyone else would either. Willy, Deborah's best friend, and his parents are into horror movies, but when I was thinking classic horror, like Dracula and The Birds, (a movie I wasn't allowed to see when I was six or seven.) Deborah struggles with her family and culture's idea of what makes a good meal, so will kids see the importance of this?

I hope so. I hope the novel will put what is gratuitous in context and will give the little Estefanies and Gabriels a point of reference as they grow older, that they'll understand Deborah's delimma, and not just get off on the feeding she does.

Did the parents of the boys I saw in the video store talk to their kids about what they were watching after Saw 2 was over? I hope so. I hope parents will take to their kids about HUNGRY, as well.