Umbrellas, Stories, and Car Rides

 Summer in Chicago means concerts at Ravinia. For my husband and me it means Chicago Symphony concerts, outdoors, in a lovely park on the North Shore. I have been going to concerts there since I came to Chicago in 1975. Dean has been going even longer since he is a native Chicagoan. There are other concerts there besides the CSO -- recitals, popular singers, children's concerts... We mostly go for the CSO.

A week or so ago we were driving to Ravinia and I was working on trying to get an umbrella to close properly. It was one of those umbrellas that fold up quite small but one of the metal pieces was bent or something and it didn't fold properly. The umbrella made me think of Carl Sandberg's story, "Three Boys with Jugs of Molasses and Secret Ambitions," from Rootabaga Stories. My sister had the book when we were kids, given to her by our uncle who loved books and always gifted us with interesting selections. Later I became a Junior Great Books leader and this story was one of the selections - it made for interesting discussions.

The basic plot of this story is three boys whose mothers send them to get jugs of molasses but on their way home one jug breaks and the boys step into the spilled molasses and shrink, entering a world existing in the grass. They have adventures, including a visit to a parasol store, where the clerk informs them that they cannot buy an umbrella because you will inevitably lose it--

“They always come back. These are the famous twisted-nose parasols made from the famous pink grass. You will lose them all, all three. Then they will all walk back to me here in this store on main street. I can not sell you something I know you will surely lose. Neither can I ask you to pay, for something you will forget, somewhere sometime, and when you forget it, it will walk back here to me again."

I told Dean about the parasol store in the story and since he didn't know the story I looked it up on my phone and asked if he wanted to hear it. So I read the whole story to him as we drove toward Lake Michigan. He's not a fiction reader generally, but he listened intently to the whole story. It was lovely, getting to share a favorite of mine with him.