Dear Mr. Henshaw by Beverly Cleary Page B

of my pants to a chair and answer your questions and answer them fully. So here goes.
    1. Who are you?
    Like I’ve been telling you, I am Leigh Botts. Leigh Marcus Botts. I don’t like Leigh for a name because some people don’t know how to say it or think it’s a girl’s name. Mom says with a last name like Botts I need something fancy but not too fancy. My Dad’s name is Bill and Mom’s name is Bonnie. She says Bill and Bonnie Botts sounds like something out of a comic strip.
    I am just a plain boy. This school doesn’t sayI am Gifted and Talented, and I don’t like soccer very much the way everybody at this school is supposed to. I am not stupid either.
    2. What do you look like?
    I already sent you my picture, but maybe you lost it. I am sort of medium. I don’t have red hair or anything like that. I’m not real big like my Dad. Mom says I take after her family, thank goodness. That’s the way she always says it. In first and second grades kids used to call me Leigh the Flea, but I have grown. Now when the class lines up according to height, I am in the middle. I guess you could call me the mediumest boy in the class.
    This is hard work. To be continued, maybe.
    Leigh Botts
    Â 
    November 22
    Dear Mr. Henshaw,
    I wasn’t going to answer any more of your questions, but Mom won’t get the TV repaired because she says it was rotting my brain. This is Thanksgiving vacation and I am so bored I decided to answer a couple of your rotten questions with my rotten brain. (Joke.)
    3. What is your family like?
    Since Dad and Bandit went away, my family is just Mom and me. We all used to live in a mobile home outside of Bakersfield which is in California’s Great Central Valley we studied about in school. When Mom and Dad got divorced, they sold the mobile home, and Dad moved into a trailer.
    Dad drives a big truck, a cab-over job. That means the cab is over the engine. Some people don’t know that. The truck is why my parents got divorced. Dad used to drive for someone else, hauling stuff like cotton, sugar beets andother produce around Central California and Nevada, but he couldn’t get owning his own rig for cross-country hauling out of his head. He worked practically night and day and saved a down payment. Mom said we’d never get out of that mobile home when he had to make such big payments on that rig, and she’d never know where he was when he hauled cross-country. His big rig sure is a beauty, with a bunk in the cab and everything. His rig, which truckers call a tractor but everyone else calls a truck, has ten wheels, two in front and eight in back so he can hitch up to anything—flatbeds, refrigerated vans, a couple of gondolas.
    In school they teach you that a gondola is some kind of boat in Italy, but in the U.S. it is a container for hauling loose stuff like carrots.
    My hand is all worn out from all this writing, but I try to treat Mom and Dad the same so I’ll get to Mom next time.
    Your pooped reader,
Leigh Botts
    Â 
    November 23
    Mr. Henshaw:
    Why should I call you “dear,” when you are the reason I’m stuck with all this work? It wouldn’t be fair to leave Mom out so here is Question 3 continued.
    Mom works part time for Catering by Katy which is run by a real nice lady Mom knew when she was growing up in Taft, California. Katy says all women who grew up in Taft had to be good cooks because they went to so many potluck suppers. Mom and Katy and some other ladies make fancy food for weddings and parties. They also bake cheesecake and apple strudel for restaurants. Mom is a good cook. I just wish she would do it more at home, like the mother in Moose on Toast . Almost every day Katy gives Mom something good to put in my school lunch.
    Mom also takes a couple of courses at the community college. She wants to be an LVN which means Licensed Vocational Nurse.They help real nurses except they don’t stick needles in