Pirate Lunch Post

We’re big believers in pirates in this household.

Not the poor-Somalis-in-Zodiacs-with-more-ammo-than-food kind, but the semi-imaginary, eye-patch-parrot-and-rum kind. Since we saw an illustration a few years ago of the flags flown by different pirates, like Edward Teach, Ben’s been fascinated by these logo-like banners. He loves that sort of thing. Left alone with a stack of paper and a blunt pencil, he’ll crank out a dozen posters for movies that exist only in his imagination (yet). They’re never stand-alone films, but sprawling epics, like movie serials from the 1930s, each with a title, an episode number, and logo. Lately, he’s been deep into creating comics (“graphic novels,” he insists, though they’re usually only a few pages long), messing with codes and hieroglyphics, and crafting logos for his heroes. So, you can imagine how excited I was when I slipped today’s Lunch Post into his bag.

I was silent when I pulled it out tonight and saw…the Statue of Liberty. Silent for a while, then I closed my eyes and chuckled. Like many folk who live in New York City, I’ve never been to the Statue and I don’t think Ben has any real connection to it other than Planet of the Apes and Shaun Tan’s The Arrrival. I thought there might be some cool story there, an undisclosed interest in the big bronze statue stuck in the harbor, so I asked him. No great secret: he wasn’t in a pirate mood, and couldn’t think of anything to do for the Lunch Post til he spotted a poster of the Statue of Liberty hanging in the lunch room. And, bang, there she is. <shrug> It’s funny anyway.