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five to six: a morning meditation...or something |
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If broccoli can be cryovacked, move through space at 75 miles per hour, and achieve a tasty afterlife, then surely there is hope for the detritus of daily life.
It’s all in the packaging.
From five to six each morning, I package what I’ve got.
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| October 12, 2011 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Because of the Wonderful Things He Does Sunday, from the backseat on the three hour drive home from The Great Leaf Leave: Gbot: “Because! Because! Because! Because!” Mbot: “Stop saying ‘because!’” Me: “He doesn’t have to stop saying ‘because.’” Mbot: “Yeah but I don’t know what it means.” Me: “Yes you do, Silly. Your name is Mbot because Daddy and I named you that. Gbot’s name is Gbot because Daddy and I named him that.” I didn’t mention this one: we are still in the car because of a forty-minute detour. I finally remembered a good example bastardized from a favorite book, Barbara Joose and Barbara Lavallee’s Mama, Do You Love Me?): “I love you because you are my dear one.” Pause. Mbot: “I wish I hadn’t pulled out Tesserwell’s whisker.” Pause. Me: “I wish you hadn’t either, Bug. Why did you think of it now?” Mbot: “Because….” And then I had to stop scribbling on the back on an envelope held up to the steering wheel because we were jumping between stoplights and it seemed dangerous. It was a good answer, something to do with not hurting the antique cat’s body, or not hurting the antique cat’s feelings, or Mbot not hurting his own feelings. Although I remember the gist, I can’t even begin to guess exactly the words, because my memory is not good enough. And, as the visionary architect Mies van der Rohe said (albeit probably in German), “God is in the details.” Exactly is where the beauty lies. Yet exactly is damned hard to come by. As we all know too well, memory shifts beneath us. According to the Oxford Dictionary, there are over a quarter of a million words in the English language, and that’s not even counting super-technical terms or inflections or a few other creations like “super-technical.” Even if Mbot’s vocabulary consists of fewer than a thousand words, a seven-word sentence that includes nouns, articles, and verbs has something like twenty million permutations. The unpredictability astounds. I use this logic to make myself feel better about my inability to remember conversations verbatim. As a child I used to laugh when my grandmother, whose memory was no worse than mine is now, got frustrated at forgetting things. My grandfather laughed at her too, but in a grownup way that included compassion as well as love. And he’d say, “That’s what pencils are for.” Exactly. What’s the most unpredictable thing you’ve heard today? Click here for the original post at http://betsyandrewsetchart.wordpress.com. |
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| October 11, 2011 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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5,000 Miles With 40,000 Pounds of Frozen Broccoli and My Dad Former reporter Sarah Wolfgang goes on the road hoping to come home with less baggage. Click here for the original post at http://betsyandrewsetchart.wordpress.com. |
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| October 10, 2011 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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A vacation in the shape of a toilet seat. Click here for the original post at http://betsyandrewsetchart.wordpress.com |
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| October 9, 2011 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Is a 39 month-old's tendency to dally a genetic flaw from his mother's side? Click here for the original post at http://betsyandrewsetchart.wordpress.com |
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| October 8, 2011 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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My Moment of Silence, with Extras. Click here for the original post at http://betsyandrewsetchart.wordpress.com. |
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| A B O U T T H E A U T H O R | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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I’m a former magazine writer (Sun Valley Magazine, Sun Valley Guide, Mountain Living) under my maiden name, Andrews. I’ve won an Idaho Press Club Award and have taught contemporary women’s memoir at Phoenix College (not to be confused with the University of Phoenix). I'm a graduate of Mt. Holyoke College ('89) and the Denver Publishing Institute ('89), and this year, earned an MFA from Goucher College's Creative Nonfiction program, where I was named runner up for the Chris White Award. I have worked as a technical editor, a cookbook editor, a bartender, and a waitress. I have just finished a novel called The Great Swink Sting, about a ski town waitress who kidnaps a group of wealthy industrialists to achieve a wacky green agenda. My current projects include blogging, writing agent queries, and raising two toddlers, not necessarily in that order. |
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