Sign

 If you always do what interests you, at least one person is pleased.

~ Katherine Hepburn

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I like to take photographs of signs. I will pull over when I'm on my way to almost anywhere to take a photo of an interesting, funny, or even just a very old sign. 

So when someone asks me what my sign is, I ignore them because that's weird.

Tree

The very shapes of the trees were like frozen screams.

~ Susanna Clarke

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What an amazing quote. What if the trees were actually screaming, though. Then it wouldn't be so beautifully descriptive as much as it would be stating the obvious. Or painfully accurate.

Do you know the song "I Talk to the Trees?" If so, you are either old or a huge fan of musical theater.

(pause)

I bet you thought that was going to go a different direction, huh?
 

Artist

I love quotations because it is a joy to find thoughts one might have, beautifully expressed with much authority by someone recognized wiser than oneself.

~ Marlene Dietrich

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Ditto.

Old

Old houses, I thought, do not belong to people ever, not really. People belong to them.

~ Gladys Taber

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I was listening to the radio the other day. It was a storytelling show. The woman said she liked spending time with elders - at church, at events, or even sitting next to her husband.

Okay, she actually said something like "sitting next to my husband's mother at the park," but I thought she was going to stop after she said "sitting next to my husband."

I wish she had done that. I don't know her husband, but if he's a good guy he would think it was funny. And if her husband doesn't have a sense of humor, he deserves to be mocked. I find that if you mock people who don't have sense of humor it helps them get a sense of humor.

Try it. Seriously.

Then let me know how it goes so I can have another blog post.

Age

You're not as young as you used to be, but you're not as old as you're going to be.

~ Irish proverb

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Lots of people collect old things - toys, magazines, stamps, coins. 

What if we collected old people? Treasured them. Kept them in an old factory of some kind. And maybe they could make things for us. Like snacks. Or gardening tools.

And we could have people guard them. Because they are so precious. And because we need you to make those trowels, Leota!!
 

Sky

I like the sky. You can look at it forever and never get tired of it, and when you don't want to look at it anymore, you stop.

~ Haruki Murakama

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You can actually do that with a lot of things. 

Not all things (trust me).

But a lot of things.
 

Hotdogs

You can't know. You can only believe or not.

~ C. S. Lewis

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I am not a religious history or theology expert, but I know for a fact Jesus didn't eat hotdogs.
 

Unexpected

There is only one kind of shock worse than the totally unexpected: the expected for which one has refused to prepare.

~ May Renault

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I think I'd put an electrical shock up there. I've had static electric shocks that was kind of bad, too. 

All of the above are much less traumatic than the shock of seeing a toy of a baby in a floatie without wearing some sort of water safety vest. This is not a toy that teaches good parenting skills. 

Of course toys that don't teach good parenting schools are not shocking at all, are they?

 

Car

I know a lot about cars, man. I can look at any car's headlights and tell you exactly which way it's coming.

~ Mitch Hedberg

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There are new people doing new things all the time. It's hard to know everyone doing everything. Maybe social media has exacerbated this. Late's take car racing, for example. I bet it's hard to keep up with all of the race car drivers these days. 

Because they drive so fast.

Dog

What a nice night for an evening.

~ Steven Wright

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Lily thinks I'm pretty brave because I'm not scared of thunderstorms or vacuum cleaners or big cardboard boxes

I think Lily is pretty brave because she's not scared of wasps. 

(pause)

I'm glad about that for a couple of reasons now that I think about it.

 

Beer

A little bit of beer is divine medicine.

~ Paracelsus

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This fall we did a number of drives. Leslie had a broken ankle. Instead of thinking that the injury was something that happened TO her, we worked together to figure out how maybe it could happen FOR her (and us). I had been wanting to drive the Blue Ridge Parkway for years - pretty much since I moved here. So we did some drives on that, we drove the Cherohala Skyway, we did some other drives in the area where we live. 

I planned our routes and some stops along the way. We took Lily and found places she could go with us. There were a lot of breweries with space that welcomed dogs. So we went to some of those. Lily likes beer (though we don't give it to her, she sometimes has swiped some), but that wasn't the point. The point was for us to get out and enjoy the fall while Leslie healed, to get Lily out and get her socialized and used to going places and used to being around people, and to get me out and get me socialized and used to going places and used to being around people.

We were successful in two of those three goals.

 

DOG!

Did you know that there are over 300 words for love in canine?

~ Gabriel Zevin

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Lily enjoys going to breweries.

And everywhere else.
 

Zak

School is a building which has four walls with tomorrow inside.

~ Lon Watters

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This is my nephew Zak. He is one of my favorite people in the world. He is in school now. His parents told him when he brought home some good reports from school, he could get something special.

When Zak showed me what he got, I asked, "Zak, do you know what irony is?"

Bunnies

It's the Easter Bunny. It's another lie and I don't understand why we had to invent this character.

~ Todd Rundgren

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And what I do not understand is why so many people think the Easter Bunny is a boy. Girls are the ones who carry the eggs. 

Books

All information belongs to everybody all the time.

~ Maya Angelou

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Library cards are like tickets to teach us about sharing or permission slips to steal something for a little bit. 

Happy National Library Day.

Eggs

The present was an egg laid by the past that had the future inside its shell.

~ Zora Neale Hurston

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Don't put all your eggs in one plastic grocery bag in the garage.

~ Michelle Lea Boettcher

Wash

You might not ever get rich

But let me tell ya it's better than diggin' a ditch

~ Rose Royce

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Leslie was headed out of town on a trip. I told her I would vacuum the car for her. As I was headed out she said, "Did you want the Windex?"

I guess she wanted me to do more than just vacuum the car.

Cup

The usefulness of a cup is its emptiness.

~ Bruce Lee

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Some people ask if the cup is half empty or half full. I look at that cup and am annoyed with those people. Why can't they pick up their trash?

Eyes

We eat with our eyes first.

~ Apicius

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Wait. The others were edible?
 

Reading

There are some themes, some subjects too large for adult fiction; they can only be dealt with adequately in a children's book.

~ Philip Pullman

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Children are wise and then they grow up and chase things and get distracted from the wisdom, then they get older and chase the wisdom they already had when they were children.

People are probably pretty tired after all that chasing. They should relax and read a book.

Outreach

 No.

(Yes, I know I didn't include a quote. It would have broken up the flow of the post. However, if you must have a quote, here is one: "I love my rejection slips. They show me I try." ~ Sylvia Plath)

Idea

When I'm not writing I feel an awareness that something's missing. If I go a long time, it becomes worse. I become depressed. There's something vital that's not happening. A certain slow damage starts to occur. I can coast along awhile without it, but then my limbs go numb. Something bad is happening to me, and I know it. The longer I wait, the harder it is to start again.

When I'm writing, especially if it's going well, I'm living in two different dimensions: this life I'm living now, which I enjoy very much, and this completely other world I'm inhabiting that no one else knows about.

~ Jennifer Egan

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Somewhere in the very back of our minds, we all inhabit a world no one else knows about. Except that I have this lingering fear that everyone else in the world is mindreader except me. If so, you might want to stay out of the very back part of my mind, everyone. 

Trust me.

Place

If I knew where the good songs came from, I'd go there more often.

~ Leonard Cohen

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Places matter. I remember going to a conference when I was in graduate school. There was a presentation on "sense of place." I still have the handout from that session. And then I remember reading an article in The Oxford American - "The Gathering Place" by John T. Edge. It was published in 2003, and I still have the copy of the article I tore out of the magazine even though I got rid of the rest of the magazine years ago.

That article made me want to be a writer again. And the writer part is only part of it. That article made me want to be a better listener. A better watcher. To pay attention more.

Place definitely matters. Maybe as much as who we are around, where we are matters. Where we are, in part, determines who we are around, doesn't it? Like if you're at an ice cream stand you are likely going to be around people a lot different than if you are at a cemetery. In one place you're around warm people, but you are eating something cold. In the other place you're around cold people, but eating something warm. Well, at least you are if you are alone in the cemetery eating a hot chicken sandwich. 

Popcorn

Hearing nuns' confessions is like being stoned to death with popcorn.

~ Fulton J. Sheen

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All this sign makes me think about is that there are probably spiders in the popcorn.

 

Wings

 We have to be continually jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down.

~ Kurt Vonnegut

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Sometimes they say that you have to let go of the heavy weights that bog you down in order to fly higher. I say it's a nice moment if you get to drop those heavy weights on the ones who attached them to you to begin with. 

Karma and stuff.

Road

"Read attentively," [Marcus Aurelius] said. Read deeply. Read repeatedly. Aim for quality, not quantity. That's what it means to be well read. The test then is not whether you've read a lot... but what you have read a lot.

~ The Daily Stoic

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It is more important to be well read than to be widely read. 

Also this is about "read" not "road".

There's a joke in there about being well "rode" too, but this isn't that kind of a blog.

William

I must tell you friendly in your ear, sell when you can, you are not for all markets.

~ William Shakespeare

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Wow do I know some people like this. Like me. Unlike me some of you all don't realize you aren't for all markets and, well... you're not. 

Gifts

Be a good steward of your gifts.

~ Jane Kenyon

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I still don't know what the gift was. I hope they respond soon.

 

Generations

A storyteller has a different agenda from the emperor. [And yet] there's a limit to what storytelling can achieve. We're not saying that a poet can stop a battalion with a couple of lines of his poetry. But there are other forms of power. The storyteller appeals to the mind, and appeals ultimately to generations and generations, and generations.

~ Chinua Achebe

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An emperor is different from a storyteller also because they can nationalize publishing houses and the press to publish their stories. Most storytellers can't do that. Unless they are emperor storytellers... but no one is telling that story now are they?!

Dog

Our perfect companions never have fewer than four feet.

~ Colette

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Me: Knock Knock

Lily: (sighs)

Me: KNOCK KNOCK

Lily: Who's there?

Me: Pooch

Lily: Pooch who?

Me: Oh no! Do you have a cold?!