My little blog is six months (plus change) old, so to celebrate, I am having my first ever guest poster!
I met Tony Alicea through Twitter, and he has since become a dear friend – he is probably the nicest guy in my Twitter sphere. He lives in Florida, where he performs tech wizardry (he has rescued me from my ignorance, several times), listens to lots and lots of music, writes, and loves God; not at all in that order. Continue reading
Classification: Non-fiction
My littlest and I were at the library for story time last Wednesday, and I had to return a movie, and the drop slots are right there by the “used books for sale” shelves, so it’s really not my fault.
Of course I had to sidle over, to see if there was anything interesting for sale.
Of course there was. There almost always is.
Within seconds, I found a book I wanted, but I didn’t buy it right away – give me some credit. After all, as I’ve mentioned, my to-be-read collection at home now encompasses nearly two shelves of a bookcase. You do not NEED another book, I scolded myself. You put a moratorium on yourself last week, remember?
So the boy and I went into the kid’s room, where they were doing a special program on the Chinese New Year, which involved them singing songs in Chinese, which I didn’t understand, which gave me plenty of time to think about the book waiting outside on the sale shelf. Continue reading
A Mama friend recently asked me to recommend some books for her fifth-grade daughter (who is reading at a ninth-grade level, but the teachers apparently want her to stick with fifth-grade books, which sounds to me like some sort of crime against learning, if not against humanity, but never mind.)
The number one thing that fostered my interest in reading, as a child, was something that is not (I’m sorry to say) very practical for the modern family. And that was this:
We didn’t have a television in the house. Ever. From the time I was born, until I went off to college.
This arrangement posed some minor problems, of course. Whenever we went to a friend’s house, we kids would park ourselves in front of their TV and stare, slack-jawed, as though it were a five-headed creature from another planet. We absolutely could not be pried away from it, for love or money or new bicycles or anything. Continue reading
I used to think Planet Earth was a pretty big place. That was before I gained a little perspective.
A few months ago, my husband and I were driving to a friend’s house. While looking up at a streaky afternoon sky, I was jabbering on about how far away the moon was, since it was already visible. (I had only recently started reading up on the subject, and the whole thing was freaking me out, quite frankly.)
When I mentioned how big our galaxy is, my husband paused for a moment, then proclaimed, “We are Who-ville!”
And that’s a very good way to wrap your mind around it. Remember the book Horton Hears a Who by Dr. Seuss? Our Earth (which seems so very, very huge to us), is equivalent to a speck on a clover being carried around by an elephant on top of something else that is the size of our Earth.
Except, actually, we’re much, much smaller than that. Continue reading
I learned today that Tony died.
To be honest, I didn’t exactly remember his name, although it was printed on the employee tag that he’d always worn. But when the baby and I went to the grocery store, after dropping off my oldest at preschool, I saw a display set up, blocking check stand 13.
I stood off to the side for a minute, staring at the flower bouquets, the framed photographs, the cards and pieces of paper taped up, words scrawled across them. A lady was standing in front of it with her cart, staring at everything. I waited until she moved away.
As she left, our eyes met; hers had that grave look of solidarity that people get when something bad has happened, in the news. Can you believe it? Isn’t it terrible?
That’s when I realized: someone had died. As I got closer to the largest photograph, I thought Uh-oh…I hope that’s not who I think it is.
It was. It was the tall man with the gray hair and mustache and the paunchy belly, the one who always smiled at you and kept up a cheerful patter and joked with your boys, even when they gave him that silent, sober stare that toddlers are so good at. The man who remembered little things about you. The friendliest cashier that the grocery store had. Continue reading
Cathy LaGrow 