The Light In Our Lives

Her beautiful brown eyes look deep into my soul and my heart wells up with a love so big it nearly bursts. And then it aches with hurt to think that one day she’ll be gone. She’s my best friend and confidant; when I’m down she lifts me up, when I’m sad, she makes me smile, when I’m happy, she shares my joy. She always brings love into my life.

She sleeps in the most peculiar positions imaginable and snores a funky ‘garumph’ that makes her lip quiver just a tad. The first thing every morning she does a silly little dance that make me giggle and shake my head. Her appetite knows no bounds; she eats everything on her plate and isn’t shy about asking for more. She is gaining a bit of weight, though; she doesn’t like exercise like she used to, I think it’s her knees. She loves being with me and never, ever complains about what I want to do, she just goes along. She’ll curl up on the couch next to me and sleep through whatever I’m happily watching on TV. She’s happy as long as I’m happy and as long as I acknowledge her existence every now and then. She is perfect in every way.

He is an imp with doe eyes that, somehow, always look sad and can break your heart with just one glance. They seem to still reflect his orphaned beginnings, as if he fears he might one day be abandoned again. He clings ever so tightly, can’t bear to let go even for a second. That fear and insecurity provide for stomach issues for him, I’m afraid. He requires a lot of love, reassurance, and a special diet but, that’s OK, I don’t mind, not at all. Poor darling, he is so adorable but a little light on the intelligence factor. He could never join Mensa, no, not him. Ah, but never mind, his charm and loyalty are his strongest and most loveable traits. He keeps me safe and warm, and I always feel needed; it is a pact that we have. He’s my buddy and a really, really good guy.

Together they are the light in our lives, our joy first thing in the morning and our trusted comfort the last thing at night. Our ‘kids’, our ‘friends’, the energy and light that binds us. Shadow and Spider, that’s who they are.

Just Can't Get Into It!

What is it with manufacturers, retailers, and others whose merchandise they wish you to buy? They advertise, market, pay people to do demographic work, pay others to “market display” their wares, and entice you to shell out your hard earned cash to purchase items you might not need---only to get them home and find you are unable to use them due to horrific safety packaging or insane labeling or annoying price tagging. You know what I mean.

Take that audio/video cable you bought to maximize the effect of your new home theater system; it takes you five minutes to hook up the cables but an hour to get them out of that cardboard and plastic prison they came enveloped in. When all your nails have been broken and all the available cardboard has been ripped apart, you hunt down the scissors, or box cutter to whale-away at the plastic. You might be lucky to free the cable before you cut your fingers on either the cutting implement or the sharp plastic edges.

And then there are those DVDs and CDs so beautifully gift-wrapped at Christmas or on birthdays. The celebratory wrapping is a snap to get through, but the shrink wrapping on that little plastic case, well, good grief, it takes a ‘jaws of life’ to extricate it from the shrink wrap. And, once that feat is accomplished, you have to get past the ‘stuck for life’ security tape on either end of the dang case. So, your fingernails are once again ripped to shreds and the movie and/or music is already outdated by the time the thing is out of its cellophane. New Age music is now required to calm the savage beast which has been unleashed; ummmm, ummmmm, ummmmm (it isn't helping.)

But my worst bugaboos are those nasty sticky labels placed on glass or ceramic pieces. These little devils are designed to tell the potential purchaser the ‘cost of the item’, who ‘designed the item’, the ‘discount to be taken’, or some other marketing message. Some very helpful sales person places these lovely little darlings right on the front of the glass, cup, picture, bowl, frame, or other decorative piece you just have to have for your house. The trouble is that sticky little monster is on there for good, defying laws of nature and chemistry. No amount of tugging, scraping, fingernail polish remover, or stuff manufactured to remove the ‘sticky stuff’ will budge the ‘goo’. I’ve had to return frames, artwork, and decorative pottery because the labels seem to be what the merchandiser was selling rather than the item to which the label was stuck.

HELLO!!!! What possible good does it do for these masterful merchandisers to craft such wonderful marketing campaigns and then sabotage the sales with packages and labels that diminish or negate the sale altogether? It is mindless marketing. Boo, Hiss, Bah-Humbug.

My “PIT” of the month rant.

Prose, Prose, whr4 art thou, Prose?

I find text message and message board “speak” not only difficult to read but incredibly annoying and sad. A whole generation is growing up with the mistaken belief that “How R U?” is grammatically correct and that misspelled words are totally acceptable because a “message board isn’t a spelling test”. Apparently these electronically charged youth are under the odd misconception that what they learn in school is solely for the purpose of passing a test and matriculating from one grade to another until they finally graduate from some form of “higher education”. Proper spelling and grammar isn’t to be misinterpreted as useful or something that “real” people do in everyday life.

If you love the English language and appreciate well written prose and have not yet had the exasperating experience of attempting to read and understand messages posted on a message board, or your cell phone, I will be happy to supply you with the newest form of communication. Here are but a few examples of which I speak.

RU Gng Out 2Nite? (Are you going out tonight?)

IM ABT2 LV NW BHM B4 UNO IT (I’m about to leave now, be home before you know it.)

K CU (Okay, see you.)

This truncated version of language is showing up not only on message boards, but now you can find them sneaking into e-mail, essays, and other, more formal, forms of writing. I am not the first (and hopefully not the last) to be completely aggrieved at the potential for loss of language skills. The BBC carried an intriguing article not long ago about students and the use of “Text Lingo” in schools (makes me shudder to think on it):

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/2814235.stm


It would seem that this latest evolution is just the next step in the progressive decline of language. Newspapers took a perfectly good language and created Headlines, Hooks, and Captions. Since television’s advent into our lives, the little talking box has grown in size while its use of the language decreases in value. Today we are subject to Graphic Splash, Buzz Words and Sound Bytes. Literature has changed so dramatically that it is hard to believe that today’s best-selling authors have ever read the likes of Steinbeck, Hemingway, Austen, Bronte, Fitzgerald, or any other purveyor of beautiful words and thoughtful prose.

I wonder, has the written word transformed the reader or have the demands of lazy readers and writers transformed the written word? Where do you think they went, all of those lovely lost words and sentences?

As 4 me, I lng 4t dy wen wrds wr wrds n lang wz lang dat I cud read n wrt w/o a transl8R! drivN me %-)

Nature's Time Machine

It rained last night. It didn’t begin as that gentle, soft, easy rain that lulled me to sleep with my window open. The storm began to the northeast, how odd that seemed, with dark clouds gathering in an inverted bowl shape and bolt lightening hitting just beyond the field of students practicing soccer. I waited impatiently for the kids to run for cover, waited for the teacher to send them in, but they continued the practice. The scene was oddly surreal, as if two photographs had been edited together, each part having no business being attached to the other. The storm, as if minding the teacher, kept its distance from the field until the practice was completed and the students safely inside. Unleashed, the clouds and lightening and thunder and rain all rushed over the field toward the house and we watched in fascinated wonder at Nature’s excited dance of freedom. The air cooled and the breeze filled with a hundred scents, only a few we could identify. By bedtime, the frenzied boogie had calmed to a lovely waltz of soft rain and gentle breezes so that the windows could be opened when the lights were out.

Suddenly I wasn’t in Virginia anymore, I am at home in Glendale the first summer the Dodgers played in L.A.; my window open and the clock radio crackling with the voice of Vin Scully, hearing for the first time the names of Pee Wee Reese, Gil Hodges, Duke Snider, Jim Gilliam, Don Drysdale, and Sandy Koufax. Zap! I am the only one awake at my grandmother's house in La Crescenta, reading Photoplay while I listen to the pine trees whipping about outside, the smell of dusty rain in the air. Zing! I am sitting on a screened porch at a Maine cabin near Camden, watching a late summer squall flash across Penobscot Bay.

Time travel by smell, what a glorious trip.