Image by Darwin Bell via Flickr

Just sit down and write.  Don’t agonize over it.  Just write!

Great advice.  But … yeeeaaahhh.  I’m just a little bit OC, and I want every word to be just right.  I want to put forth great thoughts in perfect grammar, so that my readers will be astonished, amazed, and gloriously edified.

And there’s a lot to be said for going over your work and polishing it, making it shine.  I don’t think I know of anyone who just sat down and wrote a brilliant novel or thesis without hesitation or revision.  To put out a high-quality product takes a lot of hard work.

And that’s just it.  It takes work.  I can’t expect to sit down and, on my very first try, put out the next Great American Novel or the thesis to end all theses. I have to EXPECT to write and revise and dispose and write and revise some more.

Which, of course, means that you have to start.  You have to put words down.  Even if they’re stupid words.  The wrong words.  Clumsy words.  PUT THEM DOWN ON PAPER!  (Or your computer screen, depending on how you prefer to write.) 

Once you have those initial words, THEN you can work at them – expand your thoughts – change the wording – correct the grammar – polish your expression.

And this goes for blogging as well as writing novels or doctoral theses.  Even the smallest articles are worth doing well, are worth polishing and fine-tuning.  No, it’s not quite as excruciating or thorough a process; I, for one, am not getting paid to blog, so I’m not quite as particular as I would be for, say, a magazine article or a short story.

I do understand that not everyone agrees with me.  Just read a couple of blogs where the authors think the precise opposite:  let the words flow out, no revision or even spell-check, and let it fly.  I understand that their “worldview” of blogging is not the same as mine.  And this is a good thing – diversity is what makes the world so much more interesting.

But for me, I want even my blogs to be well-crafted.  But not so well-crafted that they never get published!  Gotta quit somewhere and let it go.

Kinda like parenting.  You can pour only so much into your child; sooner or later you have to let them go out into that big, scary world on their own and live their own lives; make their own mistakes; learn their own life-lessons.  And so with my posts:  do what I can with them in a reasonable amount of time, and then let them go.

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I love to write.  Fact is, I enjoy the actual physical act of writing, as well as the more intellectual pursuit of putting thoughts and ideas into words.  I love feeling that pen in my hand; seeing a blank sheet of paper get filled up with words – my words!  I guess that seems a bit silly, when right now I am typing this into my wordpress program – but really, my preference will probably always be for that physical act, not the computer word-processing.

But since I haven’t figured out how to write my blogs like that…I will use the computer, and probably reach a few more people.

Putting thoughts and ideas into words is one of the reasons I started blogging in the first place:  to put down thoughts that would hopefully get other people thinking.

I’ve been blogging for a few months now, with some success:  others have stopped by, read what I’ve posted, and “liked” and/or commented.  I hardly dared to dream, when I first got started, that anyone else would want to read what I had posted.  Now I feel a bit more confidence.  Perhaps I’m not the best, the most erudite, or the funniest blogger out there – but I DO have something to say.

So now I think I will branch out.  I plan to start another blog.  This one will be very much concerned with a facet of my life that I have scarcely touched on here.  That is my relationship with Jesus Christ – my Savior, my hero, my very best friend, and the Lord of my life.

So if you’re interested in some religious/spiritual musings, please check out wordspiritjourneys.wordpress.com in a few days.  Hope to see you there!

Image via Wikipedia Scheherazade and her sultan

We use music in so much of our modern culture – TV shows, cartoons, movies, ads, stores, elevators, youtube, videos – that sooner or later you find a piece of music that will always remind you of one particular thing.

 For instance:  listening to my favorite classical radio station this morning, I heard them play Scheherazade by Rimsky-Korsakov.  Every time I hear that music, I am brought back to my childhood.  Those were the days of vinyl records – before iPods, before CDs, before cassette tapes , even before stereo 8-tracks!  (Have I sufficiently dated myself now?)  Our family owned some story records, which we kids would play from time to time.  One of them was the story of Aladdin; and the music from Scheherazade was the musical background.  I can even, after all these years, remember one of Aladdin’s songs, sung to one of the bits from Scheherazade:

Oh, I rub my lamp,  Rub my magic lamp;

Come, my genie, come,  To my call appear…

And the genie’s sung response:

I appear for you;  I am here for you;

What you want me to,  I will do…

Well, anyway, that connection was actually quite fitting, since “Aladdin” is a Middle Eastern folktale, though perhaps not in the original Arabic version of The Book of One Thousand and One Nights.  (It was added to the collection by a French translator, Antoine Galland.)

But here’s another one, and perhaps not so close a connection.  What person of my generation can listen to the William Tell Overture by Rossini and NOT think of the Lone Ranger?  Seriously?  A musical tribute to a Swiss folk hero of the early 14th century, used to highlight the adventures of a late 19th century American vigilante?  Just a bit of a stretch.  But there it is…for all time William Tell will signify the Lone Ranger…the moving finger has moved on.

These two, for me, are the most prominent of musical “reminders.”  There certainly are plenty of others – such as Beethoven’s Symphony No. 6 in F Major, the Pastorale, which will always bring to mind Greek gods and flying horses and centaurs (from Disney’s Fantasia).  Keeping in the animated movie arena, in Ice Age, some of Sid the Sloth’s sillier antics are underscored by the music from a segment of Dimitri Kabalevsky’s The Comedians, op. 26 – very apropos indeed!

But I’ll end with just one more – the Jazz Suite No. 2:  VI, Waltz 2, by Shostakovich.  It’s a very pretty little piece of music, light and enjoyable.  But it will always remind me of an episode of A&E’s regrettably short-lived series, A Nero Wolfe Mystery.  The episode was “Champagne for One,” and Shostakovich’s music was used, appropriately enough, for the dance scenes.

With the exception of Beethoven’s Pastorale, I did not recognize these pieces of music when I first heard them in these other venues;  I learned years later where that music actually came from, as my knowledge of classical music slowly expanded.  Perhaps my appreciation of some of these pieces has been indelibly tainted – I don’t think I can ever listen to the William Tell Overture and actually think of William Tell – but others have been enhanced by their non-musical associations.  I don’t think you could find a more appropriate piece of music for Sid the Sloth schlepping about than The Comedians.

What about you?  What musical associations do you have?  Have they ruined those particular pieces for you, or enhanced them?

The picture here is of a seven-year-old boy from around the turn of the century – 19th to 20th, that is.  He was born March 20, 1895, in West New Brighton on Staten Island in the state of New York, the youngest of five children.

Many years later, he became my mother’s father.  Several years after that, he became my grandfather.  We always called him “Granddad.”

Richard Davis Lambert.  Not sure where the Richard came from, but the Davis was his mother’s maiden name.  The Davises in the United States hail all the way back to the 1600s, to a Dolor Davis who came from Kent County, England, and settled originally in New Towne (now Cambridge, MA), and who moved around a lot, eventually dying in Barnstable around 1683, well into his 80s.

The Lamberts, Richard’s paternal line, were of more recent vintage, at least in this country.  The original American colonist from our Lambert line was Henry Calvert Lambert, who came over from England in the 1830s.  Henry was a bit of a wanderer too, undoubtedly a holdover from his childhood, when his father was in the British army and was stationed all over the place, with wife and several children following along.  Henry married Catherine Porter in 1841 and  eventually went west in 1849 to join the Gold Rush; however, he did very little panning for gold, instead setting up a shop in San Francisco.  He came back east by 1855, having lost FOUR stores to fires, which were quite common in San Francisco at that time.

Henry’s fifth child, Walter, was probably born a few months after Henry had gone west to California.  Walter became my grandfather’s father.  Walter was born in Cambridge, but sometime during his childhood the family moved to West Newton.  The family story goes that Walter liked to slide down the hill in front of their house on snowy winter days, and at least once slid UNDER the moving freight train which crossed the road about halfway down the hill.

Which leads us to my grandfather, Richard.  Younger by 16 years than his oldest sibling, and by 9 years than the next-to-youngest, he was a bit of a rascal and kept the household hopping.  One of the family stories about HIM is set in their big, multi-story house; he had gotten his two older sisters, Mary and Marjorie, irked with him enough to chase him through the house.  He ended up on the top floor (an attic, I believe), and then scampered out a window and proceeded to move out onto a ledge running around the roof – while his sisters called to him in vain, Mary peering anxiously out one window and Marjorie equally anxiously out another window.  Not sure how he got out of that one!

Richard Lambert as a young man

Growing up, Richard’s health tended to be rather frail, to the point that his mother became excessively protective (at least in HIS opinion!).  After having gone to a technical school in Worcester, MA, he felt the Lambert wanderlust, but his mother (and his father, to some extent) didn’t want him to do anything wild or dangerous.  Well, since the options he was looking at involved either hopping on a ship to South America as a crew member, or going to the wilds of Labrador to work with Dr. Wilfred Grenfell, there was obviously some friction between him and his parents.  Eventually he went to Labrador for about a year, survived splendidly, and then joined the British merchant marine, later working on a minesweeper in the English Channel (this was during the early years of World War I).  He joined the American navy when the US came into the war.

 After the war he married Corinne Tyson, a young Quaker lady originally from near Gettysburg, PA.  Their oldest child was my mother, Judith Trowbridge Lambert, born in July, 1926.  They lived in Lynn, MA, for a while (that’s where my mother was born), then moved to Worcester, MA (where my mother’s twin sisters, Diana and Muriel, were born).

 

Richard worked with industry most of his adult life, in personnel.  He was also active in civic affairs, and frequently took teen boys and younger men under his wing.  For hobbies, he fished and did woodworking.

Richard Lambert, age 71 (1966)

I remember him as an older man, with smooth white hair, a quirky sense of humor, and a pipe perennially hanging from his lips.  We only saw him and Grandmother once or twice a year, since they lived on Cape Cod and we lived in western New York – traveling with eight kids is NOT an easy task, and my parents didn’t do it often.

 

Richard died in the summer of 1976, just after I graduated from college.  He had lived to see the Bicentennial of the United States; he was always interested in what was going on around him, and what was going to come next.  He is buried on Cape Cod, next to my grandmother who joined him there some 20 years later.  On his tombstone are the last three lines from this little poem by Robert Louis Stevenson, “Requiem”:

 

UNDER the wide and starry sky,
Dig the grave and let me lie.
Glad did I live and gladly die,
And I laid me down with a will.
This be the verse you grave for me:	5
Here he lies where he longed to be;
Home is the sailor, home from sea,
And the hunter home from the hill.

 

 

 

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I am not normally a radical person.  I tend to be very conservative, even stodgy.  But I am now thoroughly fed up with a lot that I’m hearing and reading, and I’m going to go out on a radical limb.

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It’s this immigration question.  Most conservative pundits that I’ve heard declare that immigration should be severely limited, and that illegal immigrants should be kept out of the country, and deported when they do come in.  I’ve read about calls for more fencing and patrols along our borders (especially the southern ones).  Many of my fellow conservatives are aghast at illegal immigrants being given free food stamps, housing, medical care, schooling – even free college.

These illegal immigrants are taking jobs from unemployed American workers – they’re taking food out of the mouths of hungry American children – they’re taking chances of college and advanced training from American youth.  I have heard all these claims and so many more.

But are they really?  Is EVERY illegal immigrant taking jobs or food or educational opportunities from Americans?  I don’t think so.  Many of those immigrants are doing jobs that most Americans wouldn’t dream of doing.  And  I don’t think too many Americans are losing the opportunity to go to college just because an illegal immigrant got there first.

Let me be really radical here.  I guess I won’t advocate totally open borders, but I think they should be more open than they are now.  No barbed wire or electrified fences, please.  And stop treating “amnesty” like a dirty word.  It’s not.  It’s a wonderful, forgiving, hope-filled word.  If someone has lived here for 25 years or more, has kept a job, has raised a family, has been a good neighbor, by all means let him or her stay.  Let the children go to school; as far as college goes, if a child has performed well enough in school to earn a scholarship, give it to him or her, but don’t give illegal immigrants any more advantages than an American citizen or a legal immigrant.  If more illegal immigrants come, by all means feed and clothe them – isn’t that what Jesus said to do?

Matthew 25:34-36 Then the king will say to those at his right hand, “Come, you that are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world; for I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me.”

 

Listen, our country was built by immigrants.  The influx of different cultures and nationalities gives our America a complexity and vibrancy that can hardly be matched elsewhere.  Even our “Native” Americans were immigrants thousands of years ago, coming over that Bering land bridge.  It doesn’t matter how you got here, or how long ago.  What matters is that you are a human being, made in the image of God, and He told us to feed and clothe and welcome everyone.   So let’s do it.

 

Some more thoughts from Jesus:

 

Mark 10:21-22 Jesus, looking at him, loved him and said, “You lack one thing; go, sell what you own, and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me.” When he heard this, he was shocked and went away grieving, for he had many possessions.

 Luke 14:12-14 He said also to the one who had invited him, “When you give a luncheon or a dinner, do not invite your friends or your brothers or your relatives or rich neighbors, in case they may invite you in return, and you would be repaid. But when you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind. And you will be blessed, because they cannot repay you, for you will be repaid at the resurrection of the righteous.”

 

 

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Now here’s a nice little word for you.  Apheresis.  It’s from the Greek, from a word meaning “to take away” or “to snatch.”   When I started this post, I had one particular definition in mind, which I will get to.  But as I was verifying my initial definition, I learned something new:

It is a word used in linguistics, to mean “the loss or omission of letters, sounds, or syllables at the beginning of a word.”  Some good examples are ‘coon for raccoon, squire for esquire, till for until, and ‘roo for kangaroo.  I’ve long noted this linguistic phenomenon – do a lot of it myself – but I never knew it had a name – until today.  See, even 50-somethings can still learn a few things!  And maybe I’ll get back to this definition in a later post.

But let me get to my initial definition.  See, I just donated blood yesterday.  Not the more common whole blood donation, but what is called the process of apheresis:  “the withdrawal of whole blood from the body, separation of one or more components, and return by transfusion of remaining blood to the donor.”

It’s an interesting process.  You’re hooked up to a special machine – not just a collection bag, like the whole blood donation – which proceeds to pull the blood out.  Then the machine gives the blood a few whirls (centrifugation, to use another big word) so that the components of the blood split up by varying densities.  The component desired is separated out, and the rest is retransfused back into your body.  And then they do the whole thing over again.

For those who might be gruesomely curious, it does feel weird to have your blood (or most of it, anyway) pumped back into your arm – kind of a cold feeling, and this time around my lips got a bit numb, then tingly, very briefly.  And it does take a lot longer than the normal whole blood donation.  Plus, if you’re giving red blood cells as I was, you have to wait twice as long before you can donate again.

So why bother with this complicated process when the same components can be separated from whole blood, and you can give whole blood more often?  Saw an interesting discussion online where someone asked that same question:  why bother?  Double-red donation, as the Red Cross terms it, is obviously more expensive, more time-consuming, and can only be done half as often. 

At least a couple of the respondents brought out the point that most people don’t give blood on a regular basis, or as often as they are able (every 8 weeks for whole blood donation).  So for those of us (I include myself) who are a bit on the forgetful side, double-red donation or apheresis might be the best way to go.  As long as I have enough iron in my blood (you need a bit more than for the whole blood donation), I can do this three times a year.

So if you want to do something worthwhile, and don’t faint at the sight of blood, and have plenty of iron in your blood, consider a double-red donation at your local Red Cross.  It’s Christmas time, after all – what better gift could you give than a bit of yourself?

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Let me be a little bit Scroogish here.  A bit of a curmudgeon, if women are allowed to be so.  I do not like how the Christmas season is being mutated into a gigantic festival of one-upmanship.

And I don’t necessarily mean ”doing” the season better than your neighbor.  We’re turning into a nation of commercialized maniacs who must top ourselves, whatever we did last year.

Since when do we have to make each Christmas bigger and better than the last one?  What possible good does that do for us, for our pocketbooks, for our kids, or for anybody but the retailer who so handily benefits from this crazed rush to spend more!  more!  more!

No, no, I am not going to reminisce on how wonderfully we did Christmas back when I was a kid.  That was then; this is now.  But I do not see why I should be forced to buy more presents and more expensive ones at that, longer light strands, bigger trees, fancier foods, just to make the holiday “perfect.”  I reject this rank commercialism that is pandemic in the US.

Frankly, there is no way for us humans to attain a “perfect” Christmas.  We live in a distorted, fallen world that will never attain perfection apart from its Creator.  In fact, that’s the very reason we HAVE Christmas – to celebrate the birth of our Savior, who came to die that we might live a new, abundant life. 

But even that very first Christmas was far from perfect… no rooms to be found in the local Holiday Inns, all the relatives out of town or full to the gills with OTHER relatives, the imported policemen in a surly mood, the bureaucrats flooding the way with paperwork, the travel long and arduous for a very pregnant woman and her worried husband.  They ended up in a barn, for heaven’s sake, amongst the straw and hay and a bunch of smelly animals.  The trained nurses and doctors were conspicuously absent.  Antiseptic conditions?  Hah!

And the visitors!  Oy!  A bunch of smelly, noisy, uncouth sheep-herders, probably with dirty beards and hands, who kept babbling about angels and voices out of heaven and other weird stuff.  I wonder if they made the baby cry.

What most of our culture now calls “Christmas” is lightyears and parsecs removed from that first Christmas.  And with all the ads and displays and neon signs, it’s so very hard to avoid getting caught up in it all – whether you’re trying to outdo yourself from last year, or you’re in despair because you’ve lost your job and you can’t buy any presents at all.

For the past few years, I’ve had a very hard time at Christmas getting out of the commercialized frenzy.  This year, I think I’m doing a little better.  I want to celebrate Christmas for its original intent:  the birth of the Baby Jesus, who grew up to become my Savior and best Friend ever.  Sure, I’ll have a tree and decorations and presents and cards – but on MY terms, not on the culture’s terms.  I WILL enjoy the season for what it truly is; I WILL enjoy my family and friends; I WILL celebrate the hope of peace on earth and good will toward men.

And I’ll try not to be a Scrooge!

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This word came to mind as I listened to the rain pounding against our metal roof.  Indeed, that’s one of the definitions of its root word, torrent:  “a violent downpour of rain.”  Other definitions of torrent include “a stream of water flowing with great rapidity and violence; a rushing, violent, or abundant and unceasing stream of anything; or a violent, tumultuous, or overwhelming flow.”

Torrential is the adjective form of torrent.  It means “pertaining to or having the nature of a torrent; resembling a torrent in rapidity or violence; falling in torrents; produced by the action of a torrent; or violent, vehement, or impassioned.”

So there’s nothing calm or ordered about torrent or torrential.  No quiet little streams meandering serenely through a shady woodland glen; this is a stream or river in full flood, dashing and smashing, throwing spume up in the air, tearing at its bed and moving silt for miles downstream.

I am a word nerd, so I looked to see what the origin of the word had been.  Curiouser and curiouser, as Alice once said.  It probably came into use as an English word around 1600, through the French torrent.  It comes originally from the Latin, as so many of our English words do, and is from the present participle of torrere.  Curiously enough, the meaning of torrere is “to scorch, burn, parch” or “to roast, bake.”

I find myself wondering how we got from “scorch” and “burn” to “a stream of water flowing with great rapidity and violence.”  Fire and water seem such opposites to me.

 Another online source use the word “seething; literally burning” as a definition of the original Latin word.  Well, if you think of “seething” in the sense of “surging or foaming as if boiling” or “being in a state of agitation or excitement” – those would aptly describe a torrent of water, I think.  So my best guess is that the connection came in the appearance of a torrent of water as something that is boiling or burning underneath.

I close with a quote from Anais Nin:

 His life rushes onward in such torrential rhythm that…only angels and devils can catch the tempo of it.

 

Do you know anyone who lives at such a crazy pace that you could imagine only angels or devils catching the tempo of it?

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I must admit, I love big words.  The more syllables, the better.  I love to hear them roll off my tongue – and yes, I DO practice the larger ones.  I don’t recall how long it took me to learn my longest word (pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis), since I learned it way back when I was a kid, but I’m sure it was several days of taking it syllable by syllable, section by section, and repeating it all multitudinous times.

Which brings me to my Word for the Day:  multitudinous.  According to my Funk & Wagnalls Standard Desk Dictionary, it means “Existing in great numbers; numerous; myriad.”  It comes from the word multitude, which itself derives from the Latin multus, meaning “much or many”.

Shakespeare used the word, so I’m in good company here:

Macbeth:
Whence is that knocking?
How is’t with me, when every noise appalls me?
What hands are here? Hah! They pluck out mine eyes.
Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood
Clean from my hand? No; this my hand will rather
The multitudinous seas incarnadine,
Making the green one red.

The word was first used in 1604 – according to pathguy.com, by Shakespeare in this very play – making it of genuine venerability.  It rhymes with platitudinous, plenitudinous, pulchritudinous, and rectitudinous.  (Thanks to merriam-webster.com for that bit of information!)  I’m sure all you poets out there will rush right out to make great rhymes with multitudinous … or perhaps not.

 No, I don’t use the word often, but when I do, it gives me a little bit of pleasure and satisfaction.  And no, I don’t expect a lot of people to share my idiosyncrasy.  But hey, there’s nothing wrong with expanding your vocabulary, is there?

I’ve lost my mother.

No, she hasn’t died.  She’s still very much alive.  And I know right where she is, to within a hundred yards or so.  Being confined to a wheelchair, and her body increasingly frail, she doesn’t get out much except for doctors’ appointments.  She’s still in the nursing home we had to put her in almost two years ago.

No, I’ve lost my mother mentally.  She has this condition called Alzheimer’s.   Ever hear of it?  And if you object to the word on the grounds that Alzheimer’s can’t be diagnosed with 100% accuracy until the patient is dead, then we’ll just call it senile dementia.  Whatever you call it – her mind is slipping away.

We’ve been watching it for several years now – bouts of forgetfulness, a few delusions, losing track of the day or date, some enhanced agitation, and a few other symptoms.  But it keeps getting worse.

I called her this past Thanksgiving morning, shortly before my husband and I were to head out the door for his mom’s house.  I didn’t pick a very good time, I guess – woke my mom up from a doze, so she was groggy and grumpy.  And I’m sure that affected the “conversation” that followed, but I still found it very unsettling.

After a few seconds of mumbling at me, Mom suddenly started describing a flower arrangement on the window ledge of her room, noting that there was one part of it (I never did get all the details of the arrangement straight in my own mind) that was very unusual.  I said something about wishing her a happy Thanksgiving – and she described the flower arrangement again.  I asked her who had sent her the arrangement – and she described the flower arrangement again.  I said something else – and she described the flower arrangement again.

Her brain was stuck in a loop with this flower arrangement.  I managed to end the conversation (if you could really call it such), and then I completely lost my composure.  This was my mom – a former librarian and bibliophile who can’t read books any more because she can’t remember what she read two pages ago – an octogenarian who told one of her daughters-in-law, on this same Thanksgiving, that she was about twenty years old – the lady who introduced me to many of our family histories, but now can’t remember that her dad, my grandfather, died back in 1976, and talks about him as if he were still alive.

I know that many others before me have gone through similar scenarios with relatives smitten with Alzheimer’s or a related dementia.  I’m afraid many more will go through this long after my mom is truly, physically gone, since there is currently no known cure for Alzheimer’s.  The disease can’t be reversed, only slowed; and some of the symptoms can be temporarily eased.

And it’s not even that I’m bearing the brunt of my mother’s deterioration.  I have two younger sisters who live much closer to Mom and have been dealing on an almost-daily basis with this for years.  God bless them.  I see Mom maybe once every few months.  I guess because I do see her at such long intervals, her deterioration looks more severe each time.

I have no proper ending for this.  I wish I had breaking news of a radical new treatment that could cure Alzheimer’s, or reverse the symptoms.  But at the moment, all I know is that I’ve lost my mother, as she fades away into a strange place where her children and grandchildren can’t follow her.

Alzheimer’s.  Almost a four-letter word – just as cruel and ugly and obscene as any four-letter word I know.