Monday Morning Musings

A recent humorous post at Daily Kos by Messaging Matters made me smile. Whoever is the creative entity behind Messaging Matters has a wry sense of humor and listed 12 reasons why a cat is not Republican. I can share just one, and you will have to go over to the site to see the rest. It’s worth the trip.

1. Cats are curious about what you do in your bedroom, but they don’t try to legislate away your freedom to do it.

That quote made me think of the cat I had when we first married, Nicky. She was not happy that she now had to share the bed, and me, with another person. She would get between me and my husband and put her paws on his back and push. He had a tickle spot that, when she touched it, would send him flying off the bed. Eventually, she accepted him, and even liked it when he played ball with her. We had a little rubber ball that he would bounce off the walls in the stairway, and Nicky loved to try to catch it.

In a terrific review at The Guardian written by Julian Baggini of Hands: What we do With Them  – and Why by psychoanalyst Darian Leader I learned a lot about hands and gestures and things we do so our idleness is not the devil’s workshop. I remember my paternal grandmother encouraging me to sew or do needlework, lest I fall prey to that ugly red monster with the pitchfork. I would rather run up and down the hill where she lived, and sometimes roll down to the sidewalk. I could also go several streets up the hill to visit an aunt who always had cookies for a visiting child.

Now I find that I have a hard time being idle. For many years now I have not been able to sit and watch television without doing some coloring, or sewing, or work on a jigsaw puzzle. Maybe the warning from my grandmother finally sunk in. LOL

Here are a couple of particularly interesting facts about hands:

In the 18th century, waving a fan was so popular that “by 1710 there were around 300 different makers in London and there was even a fan tax at mid-century”. We may moan now about how people permanently clutch their mobile phones, but back then people made the same complaints about the new technologies of the notebook and watch. A satirical advertisement in the Spectator of 1712 offered “classes on how to hold snuffboxes and take them out of the pocket in the most fashionable way”.

Gestures were even more important in Cicero’s times, when Roman orators paid as much attention to how they moved their hands as they did to their words, with the splay of the fingers and the angle of the hand all carefully planned.

In a recent blog post at Uncial Press, the publishers of my book, Play it Again, Sam, the focus was on travel, whether for real or by reading a book. Here is the opening quote:

That famous sage, Anonymous, once said, “Once a year, go someplace you’ve never been before.”

Pretty good advice, and we’d like to be able to take it more often than we do. It’s such a great big, wondrous world, and there just isn’t enough time to see it all.

I am so thankful for books that take me to places I would never get to see in real life. The parts of Canada I visit vicariously in the series by Louise Penny. The Middle East in books like Breathing Water by Tim Hallinan. England through the eyes of the late P.D. James, and many, many more.

I do treasure the memories of my trip last spring to Montana, and back home, stopping in Yellowstone National Park.

And a number of years ago, my husband and I went to Hawaii when our daughter was stationed there in the Army. That was probably the most wonderful trip I have ever taken. If Hawaii wasn’t so far away from my extended family, I would move there in a minute.

Are there favorite places you have visited by travel or via a book? Please do share in a comment. And check out Free Kindle Books and Tips for some bargains for your Kindle. My mystery, Boxes For Beds is featured there today, along with several other bargain books.