Author: S R Janssen

January 2018 Second Week

Socks! Socks!

The simple things of life can boost me over the moon. Others may win Super Lotto. But I now own five pair of the perfect socks. For a long time, I’ve had sock issues. The were too thick in the sole. They weren’t quite high enough. Recently they started slipping down the heel and bunching up under my foot. Walking half a block to get the mail was a misery. My world turned grey and lifeless. Then inspiration! Buy new socks. I took immediate action. I opened my browser to Amazon. There they were! Wool blend socks, of the perfect height, of the perfect thickness. Five pair in multiple colors. I pushed the buy button. As I write, my feet feel cozy in pair of salmon socks with turquoise toes, and ecru tops. Now I can walk a mile in my shoes without my socks sliding down my heels. Life is good.

If I had written this little ditty as a college student, nobody would have understood what I was talking about. The IBM Selectric was the last word in writing technology. If you used the word “Amazon” you were either talking about a very long river in South America, or mythological women warriors. Furthermore, I would have had to leave the house, walk to a store that sold socks and fork over real cash (college students of my generation rarely had credit cards).

The time they are a changing – day by day. Hope we don’t change ourselves into Atlantis and find ourselves at the bottom of the sea before the quarter century mark.

 

The Expanding World of Christmas Decorations

The last few days have been dedicated to taking down the Christmas decorations. On a microcosmic level, it is proof that we are living in an expanding universe. The decorations have expanded far beyond the storage in which they existed before Christmas. It required the purchase of three more 49 gallon storage tubs to pack them all, and there are still odds and ends that need fitting in somewhere.

What Came Through the Door First Week of January

Joy and Sadness

This week two strangers received joyous news. A match was found for a new kidney. Their struggle to live under the shadow of renal failure is over. The donor was my cousin Penny, who passed from this life January 4th when her life support was disconnected. One door closing opened two others. Life passes to life. Like water, life takes many forms and shapes that are beyond our ability to see. Penny lives in our memory, and in the lives of others as well.

Quentin, Who is Two

Quentin blew through the door (accompanied by his parents). They traveled from  Canada to visit his great-grandmother Genivieve Duffin. He turned two in December, and is a full-fledged member of the tribe known the world over as “the Terrible Twos.” Watching this little guy chasing the cat, running back and forth around the living room, and grabbing for everything interesting that he saw, I found myself thinking “it is the terrible twos” because it is terrible to be two. Here are these little tykes, waking up to a bright and shiny world full of wonderful things to explore, and all they encounter are people yelling “NO” and “DON”T TOUCH, and “YOU KNOW THE RULES!” When you are two it’s only natural to explore and grab and touch and climb. How else does one learn to negotiate the world? Of course one doesn’t know the rules. Big people tell them something that makes no sense in their world, then expect them to both understand and obey immediately. At two, you are so small that people can pick you up out of the blue and carry you away right in the middle of something interesting. It takes a lot of grit to survive being two.