pointing.”
Clarence looked around and remembered he wasn’t able to see Mrs. Fields’ house from here. “I think I have a little bit of a problem. Harley, we aren’t in Greenwich anymore.”
“This is Edison. We do have a public library in Edison,” Simon said.
“I don’t understand what’s happening,” Clarence said.
“Sometimes you can understand things better if you retrace your steps. Try to remember what you’ve been doing today. Maybe if you talk through it, you can figure out what happened.”
“Okay….So my cousins were cooking pancakes with hardly any baking soda in the recipe, and Jane asked for a chemistry book….” Clarence explained all the details of the morning. “The pancakes were getting flatter and flatter and I took the failures out for Harley McFarley to eat and that’s when Harley knocked me down and after I fell, I saw the children jumping rope and I heard the rhyme about bamboo. They were saying, ‘What can you do with bamboo? Play peekaboo….’ Then I chased Harley McFarley and saw you,” Clarence said.
“You seem to be able to remember lots of details about your day,” Simon said.
“Yeah,” Clarence smiled a little. “I do remember, but some of this day has felt a little weird.”
“What was weird about it?” Simon asked.
“For one thing, how do you know Harley?”
“Everybody in Edison knows Harley. He’s the town mascot.”
“I thought he belonged to Mrs. Fields,” Clarence said, “so that’s one weird thing.”
A flash of lightning appeared in the distance. Simon said, “We should pay attention to that lightning. If it moves closer to us, we’ll go inside out of harm’s way.”
Clarence looked at the black sky in the distance and saw streaks of rain falling. It was raining very hard over there, but so far, he was dry.
“Clarence, I’m curious. Why did you say Harley ate failures?” Simon asked.
“The pancakes that were made with ¼ teaspoon baking soda and 1 cup flour were not fluffy at all, so we called them failures.”
“The pancakes you gave Harley were failures? Failure is an interesting word,” Simon said. “Our failures often give us information we need. To paraphrase Thomas Edison as he searched for the filament for the light bulb, ‘I have not failed. I just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.’ By the time you return home, your cousins may have some fluffy pancakes ready.”
“I’m not worried about pancakes anymore. Now, I’m beginning to worry if I’m going to get back home at all,” Clarence said.
“We don’t know how yet, but we’ll figure it out,” Simon said.
Clarence tried to be brave. He smiled and quietly recited some of the poem he had just heard, “Put a smile on your face. What’s this place? Bambooberspace.”
Thunder rumbled and the store windows rattled. A gust of wind tossed leaves sideways and rain poured down.
Simon shouted above the rainstorm, “The sky’s opened up! Let’s take cover inside!”