Small Happinesses

There is so much tragedy, so much heartbreak, so much sicknesses and illness and disaster in this life. We see it in the papers, hear it on the radio, watch it on TV and the internet.  It can weigh us down and suck the very life out of us.   Even the small bumps in the road of life weigh us down.  The crying babies and shedding dogs;  burnt dinners and late spouses;  horrible traffic and poor gas mileage.  It bogs us down, wears at us, eats away at our joy.

It may seem that there have not been any big happinesses in life lately, but the good is there.  The happy is there.  We just need to look a bit closer, think a bit smaller.

The January (I’m a bit behind in my reading!) 2012 issue of Family Circle‘s article “Be Happy Now”, had some great advice:

“Appreciate the little things.  Spend 10 minutes before bedtime writing down three positive outcomes from the day…The mind is like your tongue swishing around life,  looking for a cavity…Instead, focus on what’s going right–and savor it.”

1.  I heard the crickets chirping while on my evening walk.

2. The sun was shining and it was a beautiful day.

3.  Best of all, I  have a couple of dahlia’s blooming!  So there, you slugs!

Just Dye It

A friend got her hair cut the other day and it looks fabulous. She said she’s also decided to stop dying her hair and is just going to let it be its natural gray.  So we were talking about hair cuts and hair color and she tells this story on her husband:

Some years ago when she was in her 30’s, but her hair was already quite gray, she told her husband that she wanted to dye her hair. He didn’t want her to. She tried to explain that her gray hair made her feel so old and she’d feel so much better about herself if she could dye it.  Hubby listened but still wasn’t buying the idea.  But honey, she said, I’ll feel so much better about myself if I dye my hair.  Please don’t be upset if I dye it.

Hubby, who had been listening t0, and looking at her, during the entire exchange replied, Sweetie, don’t dye it.  Just eat less!

Passing the Baton

My doctor sent me to the health store to get a supplement supposed to be good for reducing cholesterol.  So I went.  I’m a novice at this type of thing but I figured this can’t be hard.  Wrong.  These stores have thousands of options.  I didn’t have much luck at the first store so I took my sorry self to the store across the street.  There I was greeted by a friendly young woman.  I told her what I needed and she took me to a wall with shelves of options.  At which point I turned to her and said, You look really familiar, and she smiled and gave me her name.  She was a student at the school where I work, graduated a couple of years ago.

The last time I saw this young woman she was a student at school.  Like the other boys and girls.  Following  (or not) our rules and advise and suggestions and wisdom.  These kids grow up, graduate, and move on as they should.  And then at some random moment and location their adult world intersects with mine and now they have advise and suggestions and wisdom of their own, to share with me.

Passing the baton.   It’s the natural progression of life.  It’s a good thing.  But it still kind of freaks me out.

84, Charing Cross Road

Helene Hanff wanted t0 be a screenwriter. She studied and wrote and hired an agent.  She spent hours and days writing and submitting her work.  In between the repeated rejections, in order to pay the rent and have something for dinner, she wrote history textbooks for children. But she continued to follow her dream, wanting to write a screenplay,  writing for television instead.

After years of working toward, and dreaming about, writing a screenplay she gained fame, and some fortune, by publishing letters.  Letters she’d written and received years before, to and from a book dealer in London.  And in the process of getting those letters published she made herself and the book dealer’s family (the book dealer having since died)  something of celebrities and the store in London, a tourist attraction.  Best of all her book was adapted into a movie and a theater production.

After all of her work and writing and trying it was the ordinary substance of her life, just letters written to, and received from, a book dealer in London that went to press and went to stage.  

There’s a lesson here.  Be yourself.  Be the best “yourself” you can be.  And follow your dreams.

If you haven’t read 84, Charing Cross Road I recommend you do so.  It’s all of 90+ pages long and I think you’ll find it delightful. And maybe inspiring.

summers end

It was the perfect ending to my summer break–a camping trip with our daughter and son-in-law.  It’s a tradition now, since we’ve done it twice.  We meet up about half way between our homes which are 300 miles apart and camp for the weekend.  This year we had great weather, meaning no rain.  Sun and hot during the day, cool (actually cold once) at night.

We just relaxed.

Son-in-law did a little fishing. ( Might have helped if he’d had a line and bait.)

Enjoyed the wild life.

Played in the water.

It was the best. (Okay, I give up.  I have made three dozen attempts to reformat this sentence but WordPress won’t change it.  Sorry)

Good Bye, My Friend

I made the trip to the post office to pick up my mail the other day. Bill, bill, magazine, junk mail, bank statement, junk mail, card  from a friend.  I love real mail from friends! I tossed it all on the seat of the car and drove home.   Once home I pulled out the card and as I began to open it, it occurred to me that the envelope was the size of an announcement or invitation.  I pulled out the card and there was a picture of my friend holding a baby.  My friend was a grandparent?  She hadn’t mentioned anything about a baby when I last heard from her a few months ago.  I finished pulling out the card and stared at it for several seconds before it registered.

It was the program from my friend’s memorial service.  She passed away almost two months ago.  Her husband had sent me the card and along with it he included a lovely written note, apologizing for letting me know about my friend’s death this way.  He couldn’t find my address or phone number to call me earlier.  His wife kept those numbers in places he hadn’t been able to find.  The  card I’d recently mailed to her provided my address so he could finally notify me.

We met at church when we were about 5 years old.  We lived in different neighborhoods and went to different schools but our friendship continued through grade school, high school, college, marriage, kids, kids’ college and marriage.  As life often does however, our contact became more seasonal, birthdays and Christmas, but we maintained it.

And now she’s gone. I can’t even find the words or feelings to express my pain and sadness. But I will always cherish the memories.

Good bye, my friend. I loved you  and I will miss you. I hold onto the promise that we will meet again on that great and glorious resurrection morning.

My Technology Week

It’s been a week! First, I bought a juicer (this may not actually qualify as “technology” but it is a new device.)  I’m quite proud. I put it together all by myself and it worked!  I’ve been happily juicing all week. Throw in some of this and a little of that and viola!  A fabulous drink. I’m diggin’ this.

From the purchase of the juicer we moved up the technology ladder. I now own a Smart Phone.  It’s quite lovely. Unfortunately, it requires a Smart person to operate it.  Still looking for that person.

To top off the Week of Technology,  we now have high speed internet at home.  We live in a pocket that had no easily (without burying cable in our yard) accessible internet.  But we now have a Jetpack, through our phone carrier and high speed internet is here.

Which is kind of sad.  I rather enjoyed packing up my laptop and going to the library to use their electricity and internet.  It helped me focus; I wasn’t interrupted by all of the shiny things at home.  The upside, at least in theory, is that now I won’t have to use extra gas and time  to drive to the library.  We’ll see how this theory plays out.  I seem to be wasting a lot of time getting up to get a snack, then get a drink, then pet the dog, then let the cat in, then let the cat out, then let the dog out…

Oh!  I gotta go.  I see some carrots that need  juicing.

Back to School Survival Guide

“We all mourn the passing of summer–which you can remind your kids of while laying down the law.  Tell them: ‘I know it was so fun enjoying ice cream and family movies all the time, but now you’ve got to buckle down, be in bed on time and make sure your  chores get done.'”

Those are the words of wisdom in the September issue of Family Circle Magazine.  My kids are grown and out of school, so I won’t be reminding them to get to bed, after they’ve done their chores and mourned the passing of summer.

But I will be mourning the passing of summer and trying to get to bed on time, after doing my chores.  I work at a school and my summer ends in 4 days.  Kids, I’m with you.  Summer is ending, (sob) and it’s back to real life.  Chins up!  Together we can do this!

Shopping

I went to an office supply store today to get some pretty paper for printing.  While perusing the aisles looking stupidly for an aisle marker saying “pretty paper” I passed a bin with a $1 sign on it. I love sales so I stopped to see what I could get for just $1.  It was a small keychain calculator.  For $!.  It stopped me in my tracks.  I don’t need a calculator nor do I need another key chain.  It was the memories that stopped me.

‘Way back in the old days, when I was in college,  calculators were just coming out.  And they were expensive!! Way too expensive for me to purchase one AND pay tuition.  So I actually did math problems on an adding machine.  I have no recall of where the adding machine  came from  but I do recall that it was big and clunky and slowwwww.  And I vividly remember my statistics class.  Some of the rich kids had calculators and they could use them on the tests.  The rest of us poor kids had to use paper and pencil (adding machines were too big to take to class and they couldn’t do all the calculations anyway.)  And bless my statistics teacher. He had to follow our work to see if we knew what we were doing, even if we came up with the wrong final answer, considering we did not have calculators to use.  Can you imagine doing statistics without a calculator (not considering those of us who can no longer imagine doing statistics at all)?  It boggles the mind.

And now you can get a calculator, the size of a keychain, for $1. That boggles my mind, tool