TGIF

Friday!

I was thinking this morning, as I roused the children, how special Fridays are when you are a child. They roll out of bed with grins and anticipation of all the special-ness of the day. They have looked forward to it for so long.

To a child, a week is such an enormous length of time. Once my dad explained this phenomenon to me by saying that when you are 2 years old, one year is half a lifetime. By the time you are 4, one year is only a quarter of your lifetime. And so on.

It's no wonder that one of the things we lose as we age is the appreciation for looking forward. It's as though there is a point on the horizon of the time-line for our lives, and our eyes are fixed on it. As we come closer to that point (a mid-point?), we begin to see only what is in the present. As we begin to age past that point, more and more we look to the past.

When you think about it this way, who are the ones among us that have the most far-reaching gaze? It seems to me that it is the very young and the very old who have the natural capacity to look further, either forward or back, than the ends of their noses.

Perhaps through the eyes of my children I can recapture a bit of the wonder and mystery of what lies ahead. Like Fridays. It's pizza day. Movie and popcorn night. The end of a long week.

And when my parents visit this evening, maybe over supper I will ask them to let me borrow their view of Fridays long ago.

Failure to Deliver

Hi. This is the qmail-send program at yahoo.com.
I'm afraid I wasn't able to deliver your message to the following addresses.
This is a permanent error; I've given up. Sorry it didn't work out.

Sorry, it didn't work out.

I've given up.

This is an actual failure-to-deliver message, just received today.
Friends and I commented that it sounds so fatal.

Like....like we're breaking up.

Clear communication is so vital in relationships. Have you ever tripped over words because they are so full of meaning and emotion? Or been paralyzed in the delivery of bad news...unable to spin it in any way that will not cause pain? I have. Sometimes I think the only way that I can really communicate my true feelings is through the written word.

My tongue is a wild thing. I speak too quickly and assume that I've spoken some of the words already going through my head. Or I think aloud and my listeners assume I have come to a conclusion when I may end up, at the end of my speech, completely contradicting myself as I finally realize how I really feel. I become tongue-tied and self-conscious in the strangest of situations - sometimes it is just because of the way another looks at me.

But I love to write.

I love to back-space.
I love to read-over.
I love to do-over.

If I find an error I pounce on it, and then I have to start over reading from the beginning. I like to have other people (friendly, dramatic, expressive people) read what I write. Aloud. And they must put emphases on the correct words, and they musn't read it too fast.
And if they flub a sentence they should begin again.

Writing is a persistent thing. You keep trying until you get it right.
No giving up -- more working it out.

No breaking up.

T#s4X failure notice: I am so very sorry. I have tried everything that I could possibly think of to get your mail delivered to this recipient, and nothing is working. After a while I just re-wrote the e-mail myself, paraphrasing your general message (and correcting your grammar), and I sent it under a new hotmail address that I opened in your name. I hope you don't mind. LOVE: MAILER-KULIO.