When There's Not Just Junk in the Trunk

     Last night I read my husband one of the French Sesame Street books I have from the days I was nannying my two little guys.  I read each paragraph or page first in French, then translated it into English.  Though Kevin learned how to tell me he loves me from the bottom of his heart and ask me to marry him in French many years ago, his general knowledge of the language is still pretty limited.    

     The book I read to him is called Le Cas de Canard Disparu or The Case of the Missing Duck.  In the book, Ernie loses his rubber ducky and calls in a detective to help him find it.  The book’s quite amusing as the detective Loquet Toquet is an airhead, along the lines of a childhood version of the Pink Panther only much less dangerous, who causes more trouble and confusion than resolution. 
     Kevin was as amused by the story as he was my own anecdote of how I found the book, which had actually been missing for months.

  I read Le Cas de Canard Disparu to the kids in my French Club a while back and for several months had no idea where it ended up afterwards.       As luck and humor would have it, it was buried deep in the trunk of my car, with various other sundry items.  Amidst the junk in my trunk were some items of value.  Apparently, this tendency to deposit things in the trunk at random runs in my family.  For proof, read this.  I laughed out loud when cleaning out my car a few weeks ago and came across it.  The irony of it all, finding a book that had been missing about a rubber duck that was missing when I knew where my own rubber duck was, in my activity bag for clubs, but not where I’d placed the book. 
     Even after the book disappeared, we’d still play cache-cache (hide-and-seek) with my canard de caoutchouc (rubber ducky) from home which has never actually been in a bathtub, just in the pool at Hollins for the annual Duck Pluck.  I’d let the kids each take a turn hiding the canard de caoutchouc, then have the person who hid the duck tell those looking for it if they were getting chaud (hot) or froid (cold) as they looked around the classroom. 
     The Sesame Street books are fun to read because they remind me of when I was little and used to watch Sesame Street.  Yes, I can still remember and sing the song “Rubber Ducky.”  To be honest, my mom and I both have a hard time counting to ten in Spanish without making it sound like the rap they used to sing on Sesame Street when I was little.  Be careful what you’re kids listen to, it just might stick with you both forever.