Stories

"I will rest from my thoughts. I will give my attention wholly to the present. Therein will come solutions, and when least expected." Each Day a New Beginning"

I had the wonderful opportunity to have lunch this weekend with classmates (women) from the graduating class of 1959. We told a lot of stories about ourselves, each other and other people in the class who were not present. Basically gossip but fascinating. The thing is, they were pretty much all sad stories about husbands who ran off with the Spanish maid, guys who committed suicide, etc. It struck me that it was a good thing they were all in the past! Now we are getting up in age and have learned a lot of lessons, so we can have as much fun as possible in the present. And we did!

Fun

I went with my son-in-law's mother to Dallas to help celebrate my son-in-law's 50th birthday. It was a great weekend and a great party.

My middle daughter was born in Korea. She doesn't remember coming to the U.S. because she was too young. For a long time, she resisted knowing anything about where she came from because she hated being different. Now that she's quite a lot older, she's started being interested. Rebecca, my granddaughter, has a friend who is from Korea. I'm posting a picture of Bec's friend's mother in traditional Korean dress. She was Miss Korea at one time. I hope my middle daughter can meet her sometime and be proud of her heritage.

Grrr

I hate writing when I feel crummy. I have been feeling crummy. And I've been feeling crummy for no particular reason which usually means there's something going on that hasn't reached consciousness. I have some strategies for dealing with this condition but the problem is I don't think of them at the time I need them most. I finally came to my senses and dealt with it and now I feel better. In order to deal with these seemingly inevitable pauses, I put the strategies into place so that I don't have to remember. Boy I hope this works.

Dreams

Another amazing dream that made me wake up laughing: I dreamed that I found a green flying bug - about 4 inches from wing tip to wing tip. It turns out that it could also talk. It had the sweetest personality and soon I was extremely attached to it. But I began to worry that something would happen to it when it was out in the world so I built a cage for it for safety. Boy did it ever hat e the cage. It begged me to let it out. Since I loved it so much I did let it out but then I worried incessantly about something hurting it. So I followed it around everywhere it went, which was really tough since it could fly and I couldn't. (Although in some of my dreams I can fly, this wasn't one of them.) That was my whole dream. I ran from place to place trying to keep an eye on this wonderful bug in order to keep it safe. It didn't seem to have good sense and just constantly defied safety by investigating everything that interested it. Hmmm. I was really stressed! Hmmm. Seems like I have experienced this scenario in some of my real life relationships. Ha!

Lagniappe

Creole word meaning "a little bit extra." Pronounced "lanyap." A new word for me. However, it seems that everyone I know who has spent some time in Louisiana knows this wonderful word. I think this word is quite profound. Why not always give "a little bit extra?" Wouldn't that feel good? Wouldn't it be better than trying to give as little as possible? Since 1991 I have supervised people and found that many, many of them try to earn their paychecks by giving just a little bit less than I hoped. I think I may have done this too at some points in my life. It doesn't work. But giving a little bit extra makes everyone happy - especially the giver.

Happy April Fools Day!

This is a very special day because Ron and I went to Eureka Springs on April Fools Day in 1986 to get our marriage license and decide where we wanted to get married. We didn't think about what day it was until we were already there. Then we joked that we could always change our minds since we were getting a marriage license on that day. We laughed about it every year and celebrated it like it was our actual anniversary which was April 16. We were certainly like April Fools. We were in love and frightened half to death. And that was our story for the next 20 years.