Finishing What You Start

Once when my sisters and I were young and being homeschooled, my mom started to read us a fairy tale called The Red Shoes. This, I think, was our first taste of the truth that the orginal versions of fairy tales are certainly not for the faint of heart. We read about the girl whose vanity led her to be forced (by an angel, no less) to dance continually in a pair of red shoes, and we paled in horror when she had an excutioner cut off her feet, in an attempt to escape her punishment. Alas, her feet just kept dancing away, and did so in front of her. My mom said, "This is awful...but we started it, and we should finish." And so we did, all the way to the end, where the girl is at last granted mercy, and her heart bursts with joy and gratitude. No, literally. Her heart bursts, and she dies. So there, vain children everywhere...beware!

Every once in awhile, we like to tease my Mom about this, asking her if she remembers The Red Shoes, because she always says, "I'm so sorry! I don't know why I thought we just needed to finish that!" Don't worry, Mom, none of us suffered any lasting damage, and finishing what you start is a good principle. But I think there can be exceptions, and The Red Shoes probably was one. More recently, the kids and I started Incident on Hawk's Hill, which sounded like it would be a pretty interesting story, based on true events, about a boy who is lost on the Canadian prarie for two or three months and is cared for by a badger. We made it about halfway through, when one night I skimmed ahead a bit to see if it would get...let's put this politely... slightly more exciting. Thus far it had been alternating between the badger's backstory and the boy's, and at the end of each chapter, I had been saying, "I think they'll meet in the next chapter! Won't that be interesting?" trying to pump up the non-existent enthusiasm of my listeners. So upon reading further after the kids had gone to bed that particular night, I discovered that the boy and the badger finally did meet, and that it really was fascinating how the badger provided for the boy. However, I should have thought about how that would happen, because the boy's fare under the badgers provision consisted of raw meat and eggs..in fairly graphic detail.

So I decided then that while usually it's best to start what you finish, but sometimes it's not a bad idea just to summarize. The next day I told the kids that hooray! - not only did the book have a happy ending, which I briefly outlined for them, but that we didn't have to read it anymore. They were finally excited!