Abenaki

For some reason, I find myself fascinated with the word Abenaki... maybe it is because I find it fun to say out loud. Or -- maybe it is because I think my land may be haunted by members of traveling Abenaki pushed west by European settlers of long ago. They began to intermingle with other Native American tribes of this region by that point in time. Either way -- language has always been a personal interest. I have personal faves. A case in point -- my favorite French word is parapluie. When you say it out loud the "r" sort of catches in the back of your throat.  Again -- so fun to say out loud -- much preferable to the word in English -- umbrella -- although there is something to be said for that word as well. 

American English seems to have borrowed words from all over the place. Around here -- many words have come from the languages of Native Americans -- like the word Succotash, one of my Mom's personal faves -- the food, not the word.  The word actually comes from the Narragansett Indian word msickquatash which means boiled corn. Say that five times real fast. Are you bored yet?

It is fun to know though that other languages have borrowed from us as we have from them.  Popular in France today is the French word "le weekend".  Obviously we share well. Good to know. From time to time, some of you, knowing how I am about words, have shared your favorites with me as well.  Thank you for that. And now -- moving a bit awkwardly from that idea to my most important idea of the day....

Your sharing with me is just one of the many things I am thankful for on this Thanksgiving Day.  I am blessed with family and friends, and then there are the many seemingly small, but yet important, things and moments ... and ... so much more.  I am Thankful for all my blessings ... almost overwhelming thankful.  Happy Thanksgiving to all! So much for which to be thankful. You included.

Happy Thanksgiving! 

 

I can't even...

The other day I was scrolling through my news feed on Facebook with the sound muted as is often the case, and I ran across an ad of some sort with a young woman selling an as yet to be determined something. Her appearance made me stop, think carefully, and wonder.  It was her startling makeup. I cannot remember what she was talking about if I even knew.  I may not have even figured it out because … #1 I was trying to read her lips, and #2 I was mesmerized by her face.  She was a lovely young woman, but her make-up was so thick I had to fight the tendency to try to wipe/scrape some it off through the monitor screen. I found myself reaching for a Kleenex and wishing I had longer finger nails. Her skin must have been suffocating under the weight of it all.  But – it went beyond that.

Are you familiar?  Totally blemish free and perfectly highlighted with bronzer, lips lined with a darker shade than that of the actual lipstick color ....  All that is fine, I guess – if you like that sort of unnatural and too perfect look, but… it was the eyebrows that gave me pause.  I simply could not get my eyes off the eyebrows.  They were a wide gray smudge on top of her heavily tweezed actual brows (you could easily see her real ones underneath the shaded area).  It was like she was going for the Brook Shields’ heavy brow look, but tying to create “the look” with a faded, wide tipped magic marker. Each brow was perfectly shaped as if a stencil was employed.  I can’t even…. 

Call me whatever, but it made me think of Hans Christian Andersen’s The Emperor’s New Clothes in some distorted way. Whoever convinced this darling young woman that those brows would look natural or even good? Doesn’t she realize that the extreme can detract from the message she wants to deliver? It also made me think of women today, who wear stupid shoes and have no idea that they look ridiculous.  I am talking about those women you see on TV who must have people help them walk in their stylish footwear. It is not just that some shoes are not to my personal taste; it is more. It is in the same category of icky as are some nose rings that, from the side, look like there is a large booger hanging from the "piercee's" nose. Oh - I have to stop now.  It is nuts.   

 #old fart again

 

Shoulder Companions

Years ago, I come across the idea of the hero’s journey. You can find this idea all over the place… in biblical stories like Moses wandering for 40 years in the desert or Daniel in the lions’ den. Journeys such as these also form the plots of a lot of fiction and nonfiction as well as in the story lines of movies and tv shows. My idea is that you can also see this hero's journey in the quiet and maybe not so quiet struggles of the world and of all individual people as well. I used to think of it as I watched students getting themselves to school every single day in spite of serious "complications" at home and/or surrounding them. These journeys are complicated - the lines and barriers are not always clearly defined or easily managed.

Anyway -- the idea of the hero’s journey is that a person enters into a period of trial that involves struggle – physical, mental or emotional. Throughout the journey, the individual learns lessons -hopefully coming out at the end as a better person. These quests do not always have a happy ending though and sometimes it is difficult - or even seemingly impossible - to define goals or to discover which path(s) to take. Choices that once seem defined become blurred. The struggles take on different characteristics – sometimes involving the ways of the world or other people in it. Differences in cultures, beliefs, traditions may blur or overlap in complicated ways.

People finding their way through a pandemic strike me as being on a hero’s journey. Hopefully we have all learned positive lessons from the experience including important lessons about ourselves and the world we live in.

People moving through periods of grief and change are on a journey as well. Hopefully they will find their way and be stronger and perhaps even more compassionate in some way in the end. (Sometimes it is hard/seemingly impossible to find the positive at times like these.)

Focus now on Americans in the week of an important election. The results are still coming in as I write. We as Americans are finding our way through difficult times. We are on a journey. We need to make the best of it and learn. Unlike many in the world, we do have a say in how we will come out at the end of the journey. Hopefully we will begin to work together and in strength continue on our way. Americans are a strong people.  

I do believe that everyone has an important journey - not just heroes … that perhaps just living is in some way heroic at times. Choices become magnified again and again. So do consequences.  Others believe that all human struggles are heroic and that all human beings have hero potential. Either way – we all have challenges ahead. Hopefully we, as Americans, can stand shoulder to shoulder and face them together.  Americans are known to be a strong, generous people who cherish their hard won freedoms. We understand differences of opinion and ways of doing things.  Our country is a melting pot in the best sense of the term. We need to step up and out of the complicated and divisive political muck of the times – and sort it out together as people who cherish freedoms. We can do this. We can be “shoulder companions” and move forward to a better and stronger America, a tolerant America that values all Americans. 

Now is another time to focus on what we all have in common rather than on differences we may have or may have had. We are all in this together.

Persnickety...

 

Every once in a great while I have the outside of my windows professionally cleaned. I am persnickety about windows in general.  I have no problem keeping the inside all sparkly, but dragging a ladder around outside and the ups and downs that entails is not fun… or a good idea at this stage of the game. As for that ladder -- I once spent an entire year looking for it. It turned up missing shortly after I missed the bottom step and found myself on the floor of the garage taking inventory of every bone in my body. I accused both my children and their spouses of hiding it from me. Good thing they have good senses of humor and are kind and patient.  I found the ladder in my barn - eventually.  I sort of remember putting it there, but have no idea what I was thinking when I did that. It might have been related to that episode in the garage when doing windows. That would make sense. I sometimes do.

Anyway …  I had the windows done this past week and this may be a record – it did not rain immediately after as is usually does. The rains that hit the windows enough to spot them came three days later… a new record in the duration of exterior window cleanliness.

If, by the way, you still do the outside of your windows yourself, I discovered by experimenting on a whim one time, that if you put windshield washer “stuff” into a spray bottle, it works exceedingly well to eliminate all grit and spots on the outside of windows. The rain-x variety will actually keep windows from spotting. I do not recommend it for inside as it smells like something that you want to hold your breath while using. 

So … as we in Northwest Pennsylvania begin to batten down the hatches in preparation for the long winter months, I have checked the windows off the list. Some may suggest that it would have been smarter to wait until Spring, but around here, one tends to look outside from inside for a lot of months in a row.  Who really cares about clean windows in the nice weather of the summer which only lasts a couple of months anyway. Not me. Summer here is a very brief time period, a short number of days and …  I am, most often, not inside to look out or to even notice window “sparkliness".

Should I be insulted?

 

About a month ago I received an email from Ancestry.com inviting me to take part in a survey about Physical Features. I saved the email as a sort of mental “To Do Later” activity. I was curious to see about what all they were asking. They offered a preview of the types of questions asked in the survey.  The samples included questions on the shape of eyes and natural eyebrows, the directions of hair whorls, and fullness of eyebrows – in that order.  I wondered if they offered drawings or pictures you could look at to compare to your own characteristics or just word descriptors. I figured I would need a mirror as I really have no idea about my eyebrows, their fullness, or any hair whorls I might have (does that mean cowlicks?) – let alone the shape of my eyes.  I do not even know what shape my face is. I was curious, but delayed until a month later to open the survey.  It was early in the morning and I had “Less than 7 minutes” to spare. I was all excited about answering 30 questions about my physical features… maybe. I sensed some hesitation. Thought I would at least take a look. I mean – what is Ancestry.com going for here?  Like I said… I was curious.

Anyway... after struggling to see all the cowlicks on the back of my head – you know, to determine the direction of the hair whorls that I have been dealing with for my entire life -- and -- after taking a good long look at my eyebrows and eyes, I clicked on the Take the Survey button to find this:

        Sorry, you don’t qualify to take surveys at this time.

If you have questions about your eligibility, please contact our Member Services.

There was, of course the usual small box below that said Contact Us.

I opted not to do so and merely deleted the original email. After all -- I had other things to do with that 7 minutes that I had set aside for them. Then again ... why am I not qualified to take the survey at this time?  Would tomorrow be better?  How do they know that I am not qualified?  Why did they send me the email to take the survey in the first place if I am not qualified? Am I sorry that I once did the whole DNA thing with them? Perhaps. As I move along in "the journey", I find that I trust less and less... and wonder about stuff more and more.  I don't necessarily like that, but some lessons are hard learned, and I for one, have learned more than a few the hard way.

Should I feel insulted or relieved?  Really….  I only wanted to see what else they asked. I was curious to see what they are investigating.  I was hoping that I could figure out how my answers could help them "develop new traits and other DNA products". They said that was their goal. Hmm... Now I am even more curious.  

Back to the drawing board...

I noticed again the other day that some things are inevitable ... like the situation when the instructions you need to understand the most are the most poorly written.  Then again sometimes once you figure out instructions  -- after painful and tedious trial and error, you realize what they meant and wonder why you found them so difficult. Other times -- they are written in a language you once studied, but have now forgotten or in a language that you wonder how anyone can learn ever.  (Don't you "love" instructions that come in several languages and the English version seems to have been overlooked somehow?) Then ... the ultimate insult -- there are actually times when no instructions are included... not even an inaccurate drawing with arrows or numbers in little circles. The directions are simply nonexistent ... as in missing - no matter how many times you look in the shipping box. It is as annoying as when you are trying to put together something and the holes don't line up. Not all of today's ways are an improvement over the old. That is for sure.  Sometimes we are on our own. Then again...  human beings are resourceful and ingenious....

Personally I am thankful for all those total strangers who have posted "How To" videos on YouTube.  When I remember that this option is readily available, I have, without exception, found the help I needed. Again -- huge Thanks to anonymous people out there somewhere who share their knowledge so generously. Much appreciated. Technology can be a very good thing ... sometimes. When confronted with things that are difficult to sort out, we used to say, "Back to the drawing board"; now it is "Go to YouTube". It can be a good thing really - especially for those of us who find seeing the "how to do" helps us learn the "how to do".

I am always a little surprised to find that totally techno-resistant people still inhabit the planet and do so happily -- finding their way somehow pretty much like every generation before them . Maybe they are better off than those of us who at least try to keep up if only with a bit of the available technology. Trying  though can be exhausting. Sometimes it is like attempting to explain the Dewey Decimal System or the purpose of a card catalog to a Google protégé or to one who prefers an e-reader to an actual book  -- you know a real book -- the kind where the reader can flip pages easily --  backwards or forwards.  Once again... #old fart.

Poor horse... Lucky Grandfather...

 

There is nothing quite like getting caught off guard and finding yourself in uncontrollable laughter…. You know -- the kind that makes you wish you did not have a mouthful of coffee that could easily end up flying across the table or bursting out of your nose.  That is just what happened to me a few days ago. 

I was out to lunch with dear friends – all of whom I find to be uproariously funny so I should have been prepared, but ... was not.  And as I try to write about this moment, I dearly hope that it is not one of those situations where “you had to be there” to appreciate it. It would be so wonderful if you could share the fun.

Anyway – we were enjoying a hearty meal at The Pine Junction on Bailey Hill Road outside of Findley Lake or Sherman, NY depending on how you look at it (you need to go there), when a large group of “mature” women began to file in and seat themselves at several nearby tables. It was a case of older ladies travelling in packs. One of them, a most curious and perhaps a bit overly friendly individual, came over to our table to check on what we were all having for lunch. Anyway -- I found myself "people watching" and trying to imagine if they came on a bus or in several oversized vans and how they knew each other. They, by the way, have absolutely nothing to do with the story I am trying to tell you other than they were a momentary distraction.

Meanwhile the conversation at my table had continued without interruption and I had missed a great deal.  Suddenly my focus was pulled back onto my group and I heard bits and pieces of a story about a 90-year-old Grandfather, with Band-Aids or masking tape or something holding his glasses together, walking into a farm house kitchen complaining about his broken glasses and mentioning as a side story that the breakage had occurred when his horse was shot out from underneath him ... the bullet hitting the poor horse smack dab in the middle of the forehead. Say What? Now my attention was back for sure. It seems that the 90-year-old Grandfather, however, was less concerned about his horse or about how he, himself, might have been shot than he was about his broken glasses. In fact he was "madder than a wet hen".  Oh, how I wish you could have seen the facial expressions of the person who was narrating this story.  Now -- for some reason --I found this whole thing to be hysterically funny as I pictured the whole thing in my head and began to laugh uncontrollably.  The harder I tried to stop, the funnier it got. I am certain that the horse did not find the situation amusing. I speculate that the horse may have been even more upset than the nonagenarian rider. (Yes, that is what a person in their 90's is called. I looked it up).

Then to compound what I found to be hilarious and this is perhaps the key part to the story – the raconteur went on to casually mention that the horse was not dead at all really; it was, apparently, merely stunned by the bullet (perhaps a glancing blow of the miraculous variety) and struggled back up onto its feet to carry on.  Seriously … picture that! And ... all the while the horse is regaining his feet, the Grandfather is looking for his glasses which were broken on their way down. It's funny. Right? (Again – the facial expression was amazingly funny. Everyone at my table was caught up in the story by now and... I was not the only one laughing. Laughter is so contagious. I am surprised that the food curious lady didn't come over to see what was so funny.) All this said... I am reminded, once again, that "things" are most definitely not always what they seem to be ... the horse got up again. Bet he had a story to tell his animal buddies back at the barn.  

I guess there is a lesson in everything. Plus -- I do not know when I have laughed so hard. I still am laughing about it. Laughter is a very good thing. Learning can be fun. By the way – they never found out who shot the horse in the first place.  Apparently, it was a errant bullet that came out of the forest, shot by some hunter with a bad aim or something.  When one lives is this neck of the woods, we have learned to be careful about such things. Poor horse. Lucky Grandfather.