Vernon Street Swarm

While driving back from the tire store (sigh) I caught myself thinking about the class and what it would be like as an extended family and then I caught myself thinking about thinking about that, which I think is what Metacognition means. It's a word people keep using in their blogs. The guys at the tire store were unfamiliar with it. I think it might be a "rhetoric thing."

I decided Elin had to be the hub, one of (Dave, Jeff, Holly, Brett, the baby brother, spoiled rotten!) five siblings. Thanksgiving is always at Elin's house. Anyway, I developed a whole model of the class as kind of an Elin-centric family, and I figured out what everyone's role was, although some were difficult. And the ages might not add up right. Could Eric possibly be Elin's oldest (somewhat rejecting-of-her-values) child, from her disastrous youthful first marriage to Joe, although she and Joe are now good friends, time having passed? (Their other kid, JP, worked very hard at getting them to reconcile, while internalizing her own suffering.) It was loads of fun. Picture Dave as Elin's fun-loving but in-and-out-of-scrapes brother, periodically running through the front door, jamming a wad of cash into Elin's hands, barking "Hide this!" and then running out the back door.

The whole exercise struck me as ridiculous until I realized, it's sort of one of the points of tonight's discussion.