The Slice Ah, Sleeping To Sounds Of Nature

The way to learn the behind-the-facades truth about your neighborhood is to camp out overnight in your back yard.

At least that’s what one of our regular correspondents says. He did precisely that just recently. “And you hear it all,” he said.

He reported listening to seemingly everything from someone coming home drunk and tossing his cookies in the carport to a loud late-night conversation at another home about one family member’s need to get into counseling.

Let’s meet by the statue of Chris Anderson driving a bus: Spokane’s Sue Windham was in Europe recently. And she noticed something. Countries such as Austria and Hungary have a lot more statues in public places than we do around here.

Moreover, she seemed fairly certain that not everyone memorialized in that way was necessarily a four-star hero. And that got her wondering. What if residents of the Inland Northwest decided to start erecting statues right and left to commemorate past and present public figures? Whom would we choose to honor this way? And what poses would the statues capture? This is a job for Slice readers.

Life with grade-school kids: Curlew’s Gladys Lembcke has dozens of wonderful stories from her days as a teacher’s aide, one of which we shared not long ago. Here’s another of our favorites, starring a thirdgrader named Justin who was fond of Lembcke because she helped him with his reading.

“I was on playground duty one cold winter day and was wearing a fake fur car-coat. Several children were talking with me, including Justin. One child asked me where I got such a nice fur coat. On a whim, I said I had gone out and killed a bear and made myself a coat.

“There was a very skeptical silence then another child asked, ‘Mrs. Lembcke, how could an old woman like you kill a bear?’ Whereupon Justin put his hands on his hips and said indignantly ‘Mrs. Lembcke is NOT old!’ Then he added more quietly, ‘She just looks old.”’

Cause and effect: When Maggie Crabtree wears this one purple two-piece suit, people seem to want to talk to her about the Lilac Festival.

Today’s Slice question: What exactly is the point of T-ball?

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Drawing

MEMO: The Slice appears Monday, Tuesday, Friday and Saturday. Write The Slice at P.O. Box 2160, Spokane, WA 99210; call (509) 459-5470; fax (509) 459-5098. Thanks to Scott Kusel for dropping off a snapshot of the street signs at the intersection of Rowan and Martin.