Not Every Day is Exciting, but There Are Always Books

The problem with great stories - the stories that get listeners or readers howling with laughter, swearing with empathy, or nodding (in agreement or dissent) - is that they are parenthetical to the day-to-day living that makes up "life". As we know it. Live it. And, hopefully, love it. They punctuate the landscape, but do not generally make up the bulk of it. They don't offer the structures that shelter us from the elements so much as the view out the window, or the decoration at the ends of the bookshelves rather than the books themselves. I think that's is why stand-up comedy routines are seldom longer than four or five minutes. It's takes a lot of "life" to build up a one-hour act.

This reality makes it difficult to keep up the pace when one comes in contact with others through writing or story-telling. Particularly on a daily basis. You look back at the day and think,

"Well, breakfast was nice. Nobody puked, nobody stuck their fingers in hot bacon grease, and I used the leftover baked potatoes from last night's supper to make hash browns."

Technically, breakfast was a success. Practically speaking, it would make much better blogfodder if someone had thrown up in the grits, or if some other bodily malfunction had come into play. Thankfully, those stories don't come along every day.

Some days are just quiet. Most days, I hope, will be quiet days. They don't make for riotous laughter from the peanut gallery, but I'm okay with that. In spite of the large, gaping blank spot they provide for me at day's end. (Must the cursor blink? As if I don't know it's still sitting in the upper left-hand corner of my screen!) This is when it's nice to turn to the other things that make up who we are and what gets us from one great story to another: the meat of daily living.

I had hoped to write some of the wonderful quotes from Freedom & Necessity as I came across them. I do not, howver, have a reading journal on hand (and have no desire to begin one in the middle of this-particular-spot-in-life), so they never made it here. I'm sorry. You must get the book, though, and read it yourself if you get the chance. I abhor (and I use that word in its weightiest sense) Victorian-era stories, as a general rule, but the characters in this story were so well-written, so well-developed, so deliciously human that I found myself in love with them.

The scarf is coming along nicely. The directions insist that when it is washed (and blocked - they make assumptions, here...) that it will "look like crushed velvet". I will be happy if it shrinks enough to hide the few holes that seem to crop up as I progress. One particular quote in this little booklet, though, brought me a smile. These folks seem to "get it":

A yarn over is the basis for most lace patterns and is very simple to make. In fact, many new knitters make yarn overs by accident (but in those cases it's called a hole, not lace).

The boys shared three wishes tonight at supper. (I took this idea from Melissa, whose family plays "High and Low" at dinner - each person shares his or her high point and low point of the day. We modified it to just playing any type of round robin game: Thanks, where you thank each person at the table for something he did today; Three Wishes, where each person gets to think up three, well, wishes; Joys, listing the things that make you feel joyful that day; Dreams, each sharing something they would like to do in the next month... the ideas are endless, and the boys enjoy it.)

Smidge pretty much wished we'd just leave him alone and let him sleep, so we let him pass on coming up with two more.

John wished:
1) To be a grown man, like Daddy
2) To be married to a woman
3) The woman he marries must "have a golden star on her forehead"

(This contingency seems to have come from Lang's "The Twelve Brothers" story from The Red Fairy Book, in which a very loyal pricess is described thus: She was kind-hearted and of a fair countenance, and she had a gold star right in the middle of her forehead. It's an amazing story, and my heart just burst at the idea that he claimed this girl as a model of womanhood. I'm quite stunned, as we haven't read that story in months.)

James' wishes were:
1) To be able to be a grown up or a child as he chose.
2) To live forever and travel between Heaven and earth at will.
3) Unlimited wishes for the future.

Wow. Good call, although I don't know that he'd want to come back once he got there. The idea of time travel hit him about 45 seconds after the discussion ended, and when we told him "nope, just three wishes", he replied giddily, "but my last wish was for unlimited wishes, so I can add time travel."

We might have a home next week, but we have each other tonight. What more could I honestly wish for? (OK, and to be completely upfront, Zorak and I have both read The Monkey's Paw, so we refrained from joining in the game tonight. Some suspicions are just too hard to break. *grin*) And people think what we read doesn't affect us? P'shaw!

Read something uplifting, encouraging, bolstering, thought-provoking, and great!
And kiss those babies!
~Dy