The Early Years: Syruptitious

So this week, having no new “Not A Review” to do, and having only just recently done a “Teaser Tuesday” and a “Random Rejection”, I decided to return once more to the giant stack of elementary school papers that my folks sent me some years back. This one is another example of “Jim Can’t Draw”*, and also an example of “But At Least Jim Knows What To Put On Pancakes”.

Now at first glance you may think this is a rendition of a cauliflower floret:

But no! It’s a drawing of a maple tree, on a piece of paper so huge—11″x17″ (I think; I failed to measure it when I had it out, and now I’ve got a cat on my lap and so I can’t get up again)—that I couldn’t scan it, I had to lay it down on a table and take a picture of it. Based on the fact that my tree artwork only takes up half of it, and then has a big long arrow up to the top, where the species of tree is helpfully identified (in case the presence of a tap and a bucket don’t tell you), I’m going to guess that we were supposed to use the entire sheet for our drawing, and that after doing my little sketch I had an “Oh crap” moment and devised a cunning method of technically complying with the requirements. Mwa ha ha ha, behold my evil genius and despair!

As an upstate New Yorker, I am of course quite familiar with maple syrup, New York being the #2 producer of maple syrup in the United States, according to the web site Statista. On that same page at Statista, there’s a section about syrup retail, which mentions that the most popular brand of pancake syrup in the U.S. is Aunt Jemima. I’m not sure why anyone would put any reference whatsoever to “pancake syrup”, be it Aunt Jemima or Log Cabin or Mrs. Butterworth’s or any of those others, on a page about maple syrup statistics, since maple syrup and pancake syrup are so far from being the same thing they may as well be from different planets. I suppose if you’re just talking about sticky stuff that you can put on flapjacks then okay, you can mention that other stuff, I guess? But just because you can put pancake syrup on pancakes doesn’t mean you should.

* Granted I was just a little kid, but I do possess evidence that some little kids can draw.