Sunday, February 11, 2018

Random Stuff We Love!

   Hello again, life-lovers! It's been awhile since my last post, but we're back! And today, I'm just running over sundry various aspects of life, no overall theme or topic. Just singing out  the sights, sounds, scents, tastes, touches, feelings and experiences that make life beautiful! So if you'll pardon my lack of sentence structure, here are "a few of my favorite things" and hopefully, a few of yours:
   An afternoon thunderstorm. The rainbow after an afternoon thunderstorm. The concert of crickets and katydids with the lightshow of fireflies on a late summer's  night.  A greeting card hand-made by a little kid with crayon on construction paper. Or better yet, on a page torn from a spiral notebook. Better still, rendered in marker on a paper plate!
A toast: to life!
   A warm breakfast on a cold morning. Cold pizza on a warm morning. Seeing an uncommon bird in your garden. Sending Christmas cards; receiving Christmas cards. Blowing up a balloon for a kid at a birthday party. Popping balloons with kids at a birthday party.  Ever scan the radio stations in your car, and an old song comes on that was playing in your head the day or two before? Deja cool!
   I'm not sure whether there's a word for it, but I love words and names that are fun to say (and maybe mispronounce): like guacamole, Cucamonga, Kalamazoo, schistosomaisis, gesundheit! Titicaca, Zanzibar, pachyderm, and so forth. I love words, period! The nice thing about being a wordsmith is, you don't need a hot glue gun! I love birds in general, and chickens in General Tso's. I love puns, and like punsters. I love malapropisms, which is fortunate as my wife can out-malaprop Bugs Bunny!
   Roadtrips. Roadtrip playlists. Getting out on the road before dawn on an all-day road trip. I love landmarks. And passing landmarks on roadtrips. Or making a roadtrip to see a landmark. Or stopping for coffee on a roadtrip and realizing you can see a landmark from there. All the same thing? Yet another thing we love about life is looking at things from multiple angles. Haven't you ever looked at something with one eye closed, then covered to other eye to see the shift in perception?
   How about learning a new fact? Or learning a new skill?
   A trend that grieves me is that today, people spend so much time with TV shows, movies, and video games that they never notice the real world all around them. Don't get me wrong; myths and folk tales have their place in culture and are themselves stuff we love about life: only people get so immersed in them and that fantasy world, they miss all the glories and wonders right outside their windows.
   Or inside. Like a baby's laugh. Or the way an infant instinctively grasps your little finger in her tiny hand.  The way your dog or cat knows you aren't feeling well. You got brothers or sisters, cousins, maybe? Are your parents or grandparents still alive? Aunts, uncles, in-laws: if you've got family you've got a gold mine.  And perhaps it isn't gold, but I love finding money on the sidewalk. And, yes, I still bother to pick up pennies!
A rooster on the streets of Santiago, DR
   Know what else is cool? When you and a friend say the same thing at the same time! We used to say, "You owe me a beer!" when that happened, though we never actually tried to collect. Sea glass. Especially when you find a bit of blue, or (flourish of trumpets) red.  I love slang and colloquialisms, though I struggle with Ebonics. In the words of Weird Al Yankovic, "I'm a bit too white and nerdy".
   And in the words of another poet from another era, the great Robert Louis Stevenson : "The world is so full of a number of things, I'm sure we should all be as happy as kings"  I read that verse a hundred years ago (it seems) in elementary school, and it's stayed with me since. My point is, with all the beautiful, the positive things in life, why focus on the negative? Why look for the bad, why replay ugly hurtful memories in our minds when we can just as easily replay the good and the fond memories? Or better still, get together with friends and loved ones and make new good memories.
    And so I'm going to continue publishing this blog reminding us of the jewels and treasures all around us. There is so much to celebrate, so much to love. And that itself is one of the things we love about life.
 

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