Loose Leaf Notes

1. The Scrabble players are in the house, The Book House that is.

2. Yesterday I had to google ‘how to open Talenti Gelato?’

3. Every day there’s a new breaking story that’s like another nail in our country’s coffin.

4. Happiness is a spectrum that includes saddness.

5. “It is not an easy assignment, being alive. Coming awake from the stupor of near-living that lulls us through our days, awake to the knowledge that on the other side of the neighborhood ICE trucks are handcuffing people and on the other side of the planet children are dying in gunfire, while outside the first birds of spring are singing and everywhere people are falling in love and in some faraway mountain village a shepherd is singing under a thousand stars. And somehow, somehow, all of it has to cohere into a single world in which we, in all our incohesion, must live this single life.” -Maria Popova

6. I played two Scrabble games this week. The first one I opened the game with a SCRABBLE, which hardly ever happens.  The word was REDOING and I got 70 points.

7. At The Book House we played on a café table that was decorated with vintage dictionary pages.

8. After our game, we hung out for a while reading some of the dictionary words on the table. I was flabbergasted by words like foliful (full of folly but obsolete now), folliculous, folium and folkmoot.

9. I’m fascinated with finches, especially when they’re red.

10. The forsythia cast their buttercup glow when their 100-watt sun-loving gold light is turned on.

11. I told Joe he’d have to take me on vacation again so I can finish my pool book, Bob Dylan’s memoir, which I haven’t read since we got back from Siesta Key.

12. “Happiness is but a state of mind  / Anytime you want, you can cross the state line / You don’t need to be rich or well-to-do / I’ll be around, waitin’ for you” – Bob Dylan, Waiting for You

13. “With its fusion of frustration and hope, waiting is one of the most singularly maddening human experiences, and one of the great arts of living. To wait for something is to value it, to want it, to yearn for it, but to face its absence, its attainment forestalled by time and circumstance. All true waiting — which is different from abstinence, delayed gratification, and other forms of self-discipline — has an element of helplessness to it and is therefore training ground for mastering the vital, incredibly difficult balance of control and surrender that gives shape to our entire lives.” Maria Popova

______Thirteen Thursday