Category Archives: Good lines

Stuff I’ve heard and want to remember

Sweet Moment

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(Originally published on Xanga.)

During snuggle time last night Natasha kissed me, snuggled into my side and said, “Thank you for staying home with me.”

I still wonder if she understood what she was saying.

That was a thank-you about ten years earlier than I’d expected.

~~~

Added 1-24-07:

Jay has taught the girls to thank me for dinner. It is both adorable and gratifying to hear them thank me, especially in front of visitors. I am seeing the fruit of one thought-full, intentional teaching, and it’s rather inspiring for future work.

Have you met…?

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I’ve heard of “wedding crashers” before; yes, even before the movie. I’d never thought to apply the term to anybody who shows up uninvited to a party. The “crashers” part.

I was at a 10th anniversary celebration Friday night at the UAF Botanical Gardens. That’s where this story comes from. Apparently (before I arrived) there was this barefoot guy wandering around the pavilion/gazebo thing, and nobody knew who he was. Bride asked various friends who he was/here with, and nobody knew.

Finally one of them went independently to the young man and asked, “May I introduce you to the bride and groom?”

I love it.

When the 10-years-married bride approached himlater he looked at her a little funny (she was wearing a tiara of small flowers, but her dress was a simple sundress). “Are you the bride?” he asked, hesitantly.

“Yes,” she said, almost as surprised to be addressed that way. “Yes I am.”

“Nobody knew who he was,” she told me later. “I was just going over to introduce myself.”

He left shortly afterwards. I have to wonder if he was full or had been shamed into leaving. And I’ll have to remember that line about “introducing.” Good stuff, that.

Muscle-memory

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Do we consider (I wonder) the way we’re training our mind/will/emotions in our daily responses to things?

Earlier this week a friend my mom’s age was mentioning to me how her mother’s dementia was worsening. This friend described how hard it was getting to shift her mother’s focus off the negative (real and imagined) of her own world.

I said that, since we all have to choose to be positive anyway (negative seems to come so naturally), perhaps her mother was just past that place of being able to make that choice. The daughter looked me in the eye and said, “It’s a muscle-memory thing.”

I’ve been thinking about that since Tuesday– Apparently this woman used to find the negative, even when she had the choice, and now that she has less and less capacity to choose, she’s paying for it.

That phrase my friend used seems so spot-on: “Muscle memory.”

It makes me think of my guitar practice, and how exciting it is when my fingers just go where they need to be, without my having to think about it. They’re beginning to be trained, but only because I made it happen at first, by doing and thinking about it, over and over.