Loose Leaf Notes

Aka: Ice is the new crack

1. Said to Joe on an icy cold night of movie watching while trying to keep the house warm: Watching a movie is like eating cheese, best done at room temperature.

2. Stars are like pinholes in the world’s fabric that make me want to know the light on the other side.

3. The grandboys spent the weekend and the highlight of our time together was playing at a nearby frozen creek, the same one their dad played in.  While they were mining for ice diamonds – something right out of Minecraft –  I was making rainbows in the ice by hitting it with Bryce’s handmade axe.

4. Breaking ice is not like breaking bread. See HERE.

5. When Bryce (9) was born and I first heard that his name would be “Bryce,” I thought it was kind of cold, as in “Brrrr- ice.”

6. I like to write nursery rhymes for the children in my life. Here’s the one I wrote for Bryce when he was four:  Quite nice Bryce / is quite polite / He says “Thank you” / He says “Please” / He said “Excuse me” / when he bumped his sister / and “Bless you” / when his brother sneezed

7. I yawn in opera and sneeze in curses, as in “Ahhh Sh-t!”

8. Ice breaking is a family tradition, as you can see HERE in a video clip from 4 years ago called “Liam Breaking Bad.”

9.  “We come from a proven framework,” said Floyd Montessori’s Anna Berck, referring to the work of Maria Montessori, an Italian physician and early 1900s educator and innovator, acclaimed for her educational method of building on the way children naturally learn… Maria Montessori spent most of her life observing children and studying how they grow and develop,” said Ella Zander, the school’s certified lead teacher of the eight primary class students (ages 3 – 6).  “Before her research, pre-schools did not have child-size furniture.  Nobody had even considered it…” – More from my newspaper feature on the Floyd Montessori School HERE. 

10. “He talked about the really strong turnout in the Virginia election and the crowds at his speaking engagements that have been larger than ever, which he thinks is due to people being afraid of what they see happening.  “The biggest thing they’re afraid of is not this or that policy.  It’s divisiveness.  They want leaders that bring people together,” he said.” – Read more from Senator Tim Kaine’s Floyd meeting with local business people that I covered for the local paper HERE.

11. On Martin Luther King day Joe and I watched “I Am Not Your Negro,” a 2016 PBS documentary film directed by Raoul Peck, based on James Baldwin’s unfinished manuscript, Remember This House. I remembered Baldwin, a novelist and social critic, on the talk show circuit when I was young but wanted to know more, so I did some research and boned up on his contributions. Some of  his words are below.

12. “I do not know many Negroes who are eager to be “accepted” by white people, still less to be loved by them; they, the blacks, simply don’t wish to be beaten over the head by the whites every instant of our brief passage on this planet. White people will have quite enough to do in learning how to accept and love themselves and each other, and when they have achieved this — which will not be tomorrow and may very well be never — the Negro problem will no longer exist, for it will no longer be needed.” – James Baldwin

13. “Take the high road, people. The low road has a traffic jam anyway.” – My Dharmacratic poet friend Will

_________Thirteen Thursday