Smoothing the Rough Edges of Life

Two days ago while going through my morning routine I sprayed on my favorite perfume ('Pleasures' by Estee Lauder)and realized that perfume is one of those things that smooths the hard edges of life. It's a small thing - the aroma of perfume - but it makes life smell really, really good. For varying lengths of time after spraying it, I walk around in my own luxurious cloud.

This realization got me thinking about other things that smooth the rough edges of life. So far my list is short, but every time I stop to think about it, it gets longer. Here are a few items I would include:

cool shade
the sound of running water and lapping waves
wildflowers
snowmen
the smell of burning leaves in the fall
sincere compliments
laughter
soap
pellett ice

Back to School

Back to school means...
...no more sleeping in
...no more lazy afternoons at the pool
...no more messy car (We try harder to keep it clean for the carpool.)
...no more questions like, "What do you want to do today?"
...no more children lounging around the house

In short, no more irresponsibility.

I guess I hate the end of anything. Even though we tried to savor our weeks of freedom, on this eve of the first day of school I have pangs of regret. The season is over and we wasted precious time. We didn't value what we had. We didn't maximize the possibilities embodied in the very idea of summertime.

It's time now to return to alarm clocks, sack lunches, homework, and bedtimes. Every morning our family will scatter in all directions, and every evening we will reconvene at home - it's miraculous, really, how that happens.

We will all be more productive.

It's for the best - it really is - but I will miss the pitter patter of little feet around here. [Okay, they aren't so little anymore. Emily's feet have grown two and a half shoe sizes since spring!]

All of this reminds me of the last stanza of a Robert Frost poem called 'Reluctance.' I memorized these lines a long time ago and think of them at melancholy times like these, amazed by Frost's remarkable understanding of the human condition:

Ah, when to the heart of man
Was it ever less than treason,
To go with the drift of things,
To yield with grace to reason
And bow and accept the end
Of a love or season?

An Ice Cream Mystery...

For as long as I can remember, I've loved ice cream. Baskin Robbins' baseball nut has always been my favorite flavor, but at various times I've liked all kinds: butter brickle and butter pecan, fudge brownie, mint chip, jamoca almond fudge, burnt almond fudge...the list is virtually endless. Chocolate is usually, but not always, involved.

I've eaten ice cream until all of my taste buds have frozen. I've eaten ice cream for breakfast. I've eaten ice cream in several countries, in dozens of states. I've had Marble Slab, Maggie Moo's, Baskin Robbins, Swensen's, Haagen Dazs, Ben & Jerry's, Leatherby's, and Cold Stone, not to mention every brand available in grocery stores and a dozen soft serve establishments, at least. Ice cream used to be my favorite, favorite, favorite treat.

Used to be, because it isn't anymore. And I never saw this day coming. I could not have imagined it ever would.

The scriptures talk about when salt loses its savor, but what happens when ice cream loses its flavor? What does that mean?

I don't know if I finally matured and outgrew ice cream, or if I finally exceeded some kind of per capita lifetime limit, but I no longer crave ice cream at all. Never ever.

I have sensed this happening for some time, but last week when our family went out for ice cream after a cultural event I could not even finish a little paper cup of my all-time favorite Haagen Dazs flavor. And I wasn't conting calories either -- I was willing to eat it, but it was more of a bother than a pleasure and I ended up giving it away.

I have no idea what is happening, but I suppose I am glad that ONE temptation of mine has been taken away. Maybe next week, it will be back, but for now it's gone, mysteriously.

Two Very Short Poems

Here is a short poem I would like to commit to memory:

"Happy the Man" by John Dryden

Happy the man, and happy he alone,
Who can call today his own.
He who, secure within, can say,
"Tomorrow do thy worst, for I have lived today.
Be fair or foul or rain or shine,
The joys I have possessed, in spite of fate, are mine.
Not heaven itself upon the past has power,
But what has been has been,
And I have had my hour."

I know about karma, but I had never heard it described like the tide below:

"A Creed" by Edward Markham

There is a destiny that makes us brothers
None goes his way alone
All that we send into the lives of others
Comes back into our own.

Two "Words of the Day"

It's been a while since I had a basic "Word of the Day" post. I like to choose semi-familiar words (words I hear occasionally) that I can't quite define.

alacrity -- eagerness, zeal, agility (from the Latin word for lively)

EX. Once Mom gave the go-ahead, the children set up their lemonade stand with alacrity.

desultory -- leaping from one subject to another in a disconnected fashion; random; also, disappointing in performance (from the Latin word for leap)

EX. Without an agenda, the staff meeting became a desultory discussion of football statitistics and restuarant critiques.

Book Review: "How Elizabeth Barrett Browning Saved My Life" by Mameve Medwed

After seeing "Julie & Julia" this afternoon, I came home and plopped down to finish reading this novel, which I had started a little over a week ago. (I did play tennis this morning -- I'm not strictly a couch/movie theater potato!)

My one sentence assessment would be: It wasn't great literature, I didn't marvel at the author's depth of meaning or well-crafted phrases, but I enjoyed it.

A down-on-her-luck 35-year-old woman named Abby owns a small antiques business in Cambridge, Mass. where she grew up as the only child of a celebrated Harvard professor. She's had four semi-serious relationships in her life, but she's sworn off men, when she goes on the Antiques Roadshow with a chamber pot she'd inherited from her now-deceased mother. The chamber pot turns out to have some real value, and when her step-siblings see the PBS broadcast they want to split the value with her 50-50. A legal battle ensues.

I won't tell you how it ends in case you read it, but it is fairly predictable. All right, very predictable. Nonetheless, I kept turning the pages to confirm my suspicions.

Movie Review: "Julie & Julia"

It's probably too soon to write the review -- I just saw the film this afternoon, and might normally like to let it sink in a little before writing about it -- but I don't want to forget to tell everyone how GREAT "Julie & Julia" was! I loved it.

The screenplay by Nora Ephron was fantastic. The acting was superb. The settings were perfect.

"Julie & Julia" is based on two true stories: chef Julia Child's, of course, in the 1940s and '50s, and a lesser known (practically unknown) blogger named Julie in 2002.

At the beginning of the movie, Julie and her adoring husband move to a dumpy apartment in Queens. She works in a low-level government job answering calls for the Lower Manhattan Redevelopment Project, a job she clearly hates. Seeking meaning and purpose in her life, she decides she will re-create each of Julia Child's 524 recipes over the course of one year and blog about it. Parallel scenes recount Julia Child's evolution from a woman who merely loved eating and couldn't cook an egg to one of the world's most celebrated French chefs.

This is the only movie I can remember seeing in which two couples were happily in love. I can't tell you how refreshing that was to see on a movie screen! The women's husbands were completely supportive, even in their darkest hours, which is never depicted in modern books or movies. I am blessed to have a husband like their's, though I didn't really know for sure that other such men existed.

This will sound over-the-top, but "Julie & Julia" brought tears to my eyes at least three times -- once out of empathetic sadness and twice out of joy.

I can't recommend this movie highly enough.

A Philosophical Walker

A picture (taken from Google)of the Offa's Dyke trail.


I'd like to be a walker. Oh, sure, like any able-bodied person over 15 months of age, I CAN walk. I just avoid it -- especially in this heat, especially without the right shoes and the right weather and the right clothes...Especially at the end of the day when my feet are tired...I have a million excuses.

But I like the IDEA of walking, and when I actually do it, I like actually walking, too. I like seeing the details you miss seeing when you drive by, even at the neighborhood-friendly speed of 25 miles per hour.

In a 2002 op-ed piece published in the Deseret News, Bruce Northam recounted the experience of meeting a walker in Whales, where he had undertaken a 200-mile trek along Offa's Dyke, which separates that country from England. I was so charmed by the piece that I recorded the following excerpt in my book of quotations:

The roaming gene should not become out-selected over time. Walking never disappoints; it's a whimsical celebration of right now.

We met an elederly woman clutching wildflowers and asked, "Where are you going?"

She said, "I'm already there. I'm already there!"

So then we asked her, "What is the secret to a long and happy life?"

"Moments. Moments are all we get. A walker understands this."

What the Media Won’t Tell You about the American Health Care System

The following are the ten major points espoused in a report prepared by Scott W. Atlas, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and a professor of radiology and chief of neuroradiology at Stanford University Medical School

1. Americans have better survival rates than Europeans for common cancers.

2. Americans have lower cancer mortality rates than Canadians.

3. Americans have better access to treatment for chronic diseases than patients in other developed countries.

4. Americans have better access to preventive cancer screening than Canadians.

5. Lower-income Americans are in better health than comparable Canadians.

6. Americans spend less time waiting for care than patients in Canada and the United Kingdom.

7. People in countries with more government control of health care are highly dissatisfied and believe reform is needed.

8. Americans are more satisfied with the care they receive than Canadians.

9. Americans have better access to important new technologies such as medical imaging than do patients in Canada or Britain.

10. Americans are responsible for the vast majority of all health care innovations.

Here is a link to an article about John Stossell' 20/20 report on the Canadian health care system: http://newsbusters.org/blogs/brad-wilmouth/2009/08/01/abc-s-stossel-slams-socialized-medicine-finds-obama-expressed-interes