When Melanie was a little girl, she bought a coloring book expressly because of the picture of a stork that it contained. When she saw the drawing of the stork, Melanie thought to herself that it would look very beautiful if it were glossy and black, and so she bought the book and went home to color the stork with wax crayons. Well, you know what generally happens when you press very very hard on a wax crayon to produce a glossy effect (especially if you are very excited and eager to see a shiny black stork). But as she worked and worked on the picture, the stork came to look less and less like her imagined ideal and more like a mess till finally she grew so angry that she took her black crayon and drew a big black ‘X’ across the entire page. From that day forth Melanie (and I) came to speak of ’storking’ something when our ambitions exceeded our capacity and we got so furious that we felt driven to mutilate our work beyond redemption.
Sheila Ryan
Cross-posted at remembery and clusterflock.
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