Anticipation

Assisting with fourth grade homework, I saw the elementary school menu. Among the information printed on it was an announcement of a dance for fifth and sixth graders. I pointed out that next year, he'd be able to attend those dances. He was instantly interested in the idea, and asked if that was the type of dance where the boys asked the girls to dance. I said it could be and he asked what if he asked a girl to dance and she said no.

Really?

So I'm supposed to go to Rite Aid and make my selection from a "pegged bag" or a "laydown bag?" That sounds like talk of the trade to me. WTH---too much trouble to translate into consumer terms?

The Chute

The walls look weathered, and worn with time,

But still sturdy enough to do their job.

The force of life surges through,

Always in motion,

Though the pace and the goals are set

With different outcomes in mind.

Some deliberate, hesitating slightly

Before moving forward,

Trusting that they have a choice.

Others plunge ahead, reckless,

No thought, go with the flow.

The course is longer than expected

And with some alterations, and

Narrow channels branching off.

But the walls are always there,

Fading paint and unyielding structure.

The passers-through make their selection,

Each opting for their own direction.

Pulsing forward, seeking what comes next.

But all will find at the end of the run

That common truths prevail:

There is no stepping backward,

And, as diverse as the forward path is,

The exit is the same.

Gobble-de-Gook

I have now roasted my 44th Thanksgiving turkey. It's a good thing I didn't keep them all, because it would take a lot of scratch feed and cracked corn to feed that size flock.

Literal Comfort--Ignore the idiom.

When we were really little, a few houses before we moved to Valley Falls, my mother would leave us in the house while she did chores. One of those chores was milking and caring for a cow. In their early married years, my parents lived on a dairy farm, one of the most upscale and well cared for in the area. My mother, always an animal lover, would go to the barns to watch the milking. Before milking machines, cows were milked by hand into open buckets. Those buckets were a magnet for flies, and even at that well-tended dairy farm, one of the steps in processing the milk was to strain it to separate out the flies. My mother was appalled at the thought of feeding her babies fly-strained milk, and so had bought a family cow, over which she had more environmental control: she could shoo the flies away before they fell into the pail. Hand milking, and I suppose shooing flies, took a long time, and so we kids were in the house by ourselves and left alone. Well, not really alone, because our Uncle Joe lived with us in an upstairs room. By then, he had lost his wife to cancer, his only child to drowning and his left arm to an accident at the Powder Mills. Thinking back, it's no wonder that he, forced to live with his younger brother's family, had pretty much withdrawn from family life, and lived as independently as possible. He was always very kind to us kids though, and seemed to welcome our company when we followed him around outside. So when Ma was gone for what seemed an eternity, and when the house seemed empty and lonely with only my brother and sister, I would call up into the grate in the ceiling, "Joe, are you up there?" "Yes," he would answer, as he would walk around his room. "Can't you hear me--I'm walking the floor over you." Those were the words to a popular song at the time, which carried quite a different meaning, but I was reassured to hear his voice , and his footsteps overhead.

In Bloom

I brought most of Dorothy's plants to my house this summer, though not until after a period of neglect had occurred. One was a cactus, but we were not sure what kind until last week, when it burst into bloom just as a Thanksgiving Cactus should. The blossoms are a rosy peach color and there are 47 of them so far. I counted them.

Innocence Lost

The teacher in me tries to make every event a learning experience, so when the third grader showed me his report card, and one of the comment categories was "strives to do his best," I asked if he knew the meaning of strive. He and his brother figured out the meaning from context, so I used another commenton the report that "he is coming out of his shell" to illustrate idioms, which we'd previously talked about. They worked that one out, and the brother says he knew another idiom kind of like that,"coming out of the closet."