Monday was Marti’s birthday and a friend of ours gave her the perfect gift: an Eloise doll that had been in her family for some time. It was unopened in its original packaging and since true Eloise paraphernalia is no longer available, it was a real find and a treasured gift.
Marti has been an Eloise fan for most of her life – not the Eloise in the movies and DVDs with Julie Andrews as nanny, but the true Eloise that lives in the imagination inspired by the books of Kay Thompson and illustrations of Hillary Knight. As a matter of fact, that Eloise embodies much of Marti’s character since the book was written “for precocious adults.”
Eloise was indeed a precocious child, living in the Plaza Hotel in New York with her British nanny, her dog, Weenie and her turtle, Skipperdee (who eats raisins and wears sneakers). Eloise occupies her time doing “rawther” important things like riding the elevators, “skibbling” up and down the stairs, roller skating down the halls while “skiddering” two sticks along the walls bringing guests vainly to their doors, crawling around the feet of elevator riders looking for her skate key, and, of course ordering room service, “Charge it please!”
Eloise is six, and if anything needs emphasis, she just says it three times: “Nanny gets up feeling tired tired tired and puts on her kimono and skibbles over to slam those windows down so that we don’t freeze freeze freeze.”
Eloise’s precociousness consists primarily of breaking certain rules while most of the hotel staff looks the other way. That’s because they are mostly insignificant rules and minor inconveniences that endear her to the guests more than annoy them. It occurs to me now that these were the types of things I never did as a kid because it would have would have gotten me into too much trouble as a kid.
Christian behavior always seems to end up being all about straining at gnats and swallowing camels. Back then, the gnats would have been represented by a campaign against a kind of movie-going, card-playing recklessness that would have made Eloise proud, while ignoring the camels of injustice, inequity, and lack of mercy.
I wonder, what are the gnats gnats gnats we are all up in arms over today, and the camels camels camels we are ignoring?
John Fischer The Catch 
I love love love it! If we could only ignore the gnats and tend to the camels. I’m 80, but would love to be the free spirit that is Eloise. Good one, John!
Clearly, Eloise has ADHD. And must be medicated so that her behavior would be more acceptable to the norms of our society. But we don’t understand people who need to be medicated, and they’re not like us, so we don’t like them. And we must strain them right out of our world. We certainly won’t invite them into our perfectly spotless home, and let them taint our personal perfection.
We also need to strain out any and all whose lives have been rocky. For we know that God does not allow any bad thing to happen to those that He loves. If something bad has happened to someone, then it must be because God is punishing them because of some terrible sin that they harbor. And we must not invite them into our perfectly spotless world.
TimC
John, Could it be that we ignore the camels because we don’t see them? Our parents (or grandparents) let the camel stick his nose in our tents. WE now maneuver around it, like an oversized chair in a small room and think nothing of it. The gnats gnats gnats are small small small, get in our eyes and nose and aggrivate us to the point of insanity. Guess there are some who want to live with anger and misunderstanding while hollering about long hair and loud music. You are right on today.