Lucy's Book of Borft

When I was a kid, my dad had a basement office with a pair of enormous file cabinets. Every so often, he’d take one of our childhood artifacts—a school paper, a class picture or a note—and squirrel it away in his cabinet.

“Your father is a packrat,” my mom would say.

But this is why he had a note from his sister that dates back to the 1930s. It says, “NEDDIE AND JIMMY PRESSED A REAL STICKY LEAF IN MY FACE.”

A face full of sticky leaf is comedy gold in any decade. My dad knows that, and I am honored that my story about Pedro the rogue reindeer who took Santa’s sleigh to the moon earned a spot in the files. If only I’d known more about space at the time, I would have included gory details of what happened when they traveled outside Earth’s protective atmosphere. That’s the stuff of great literature, after all.

I don’t have quite the file space that my dad has, but I keep my children’s best creative works, too. I was recently pawing through the box of stuff from Lucy when she was 5, and found a real treasure: her very first book.

I still remember the day she wrote it. It was a Monday, and I was the class mom in kindergarten. The kids were told to write books. My job was to walk around the room, helping them, as needed, with all the difficult words they might want to use. The rest of the little girls were writing about kittens and ponies and sparkly rainbows and flowers.

“How do I spell unicorn?” one little girl asked.

Lucy’s book, on the other hand, was called “When I Barfed.”

Only she didn’t quite spell it that way. The cover says W I BOFT. Lucy, who likes to plow through life at warp speed, which is all the better to leave Earth’s protective atmosphere, used to consider the first letter of a word to be plenty. She now thoughtfully includes at least three letters out of any given word she might want to write. Progress!

I stood over Lucy and watched her work, curious about where she was going with her story. To me, vomit has much more narrative potential than kittens and unicorns. I did try not to laugh, because laughter in the face of creative effort can also turn children into accountants, and while there’s nothing wrong with that, the world deserves an accountant who will acknowledge that 12 and 21 are not “totally the same” just because they each have a one and a two.

The other children were curious about what Lucy was doing, too, but perhaps for different reasons.

“You’re spelling ‘barfed’ wrong,” one little girl said. “It has an R in it.” 

Lucy, always a pleaser, changed the word to “borft,” which, when you think about it, perfectly captures the actual sound of vomiting. All in all, I think the book is a quiet work of genius. There is just one line on each page, and the book reads like this:

W I Borft

By Lucy

I boft on Mom

I borft on Dad 

I borft olovr my bed 

I borft olovr EVERYTHING but then…  

I felt bedr!

I particularly like the illustrations. In the first, I’m holding Lucy in my arms. My shoulder is covered in Technicolor puke. In the next, Adam stands next to Lucy, whose mouth is open. A line connects her gaping mouth to the puddle of barf on Adam’s shirt. You can practically see it flying there. The next picture shows Lucy sitting on her bed, surrounded by a small sea of vomit. The second-to-last picture, meanwhile, is just a huge swirl of puke. And there, on the last page, is Lucy, looking much better—though she sports a pair of wicked eyebrows.

Her teacher at the time, a 20-something woman with no children, was not amused. I brought her over to watch Lucy work and she didn’t even crack a smile. To me, the little book is a treasure. It only shows that at age 5, Lucy had a certain level of nostalgia for her own youth and the good times we shared. It shows her excellent sense of humor and drama. And it shows that she has her own sense of what’s worth writing about.

It also shows that she has absolutely no remorse about puking on me, her father, her wrought-iron bed or indeed, the entire world.

Maybe I’m just biased, but I sort of see a career for her in Hollywood.

-- Martha Brockenbrough

Comments

[Lynne Marie Wanamaker]

This is outstanding! I laughed out loud. I have been known to write about barf myself--I believe it to be an excellent topic.

Incidentally, my six year old is of the same mind about only needing the first letter of any word. She signs her notes to me: ROTU--Ruler of the Universe, of course.

[Angela at mommy bytes]

To Lucy's Kindergarten teacher - lighten up! Unicorns are white and boring, barf is technicolor. What an awesome book.