NOOKS AND CRANNIES

IT CAN HAVE A CERTAIN DESPERATION TO IT—we searched every nook and cranny. Or, you can describe your hoarding auntie—she has stuff crammed in every nook and cranny. Or, maybe it can prompt some sort of adventure—let’s explore every nook and cranny. Let’s talk about that one.

The Cambridge dictionary says that nooks and crannies are: every part of a place.

Dictionary.com says: Everywhere. This metaphoric idiom pairs nook, which has meant “an out-of-the-way corner” since the mid-1300s, with cranny, which has meant “a crack or crevice” since about 1440.

Since we’re going to go digging through nooks and crannies as a sort of adventure let’s start with the places. Places can be literal like an attic or basement, a library and even a book. Places can be your town, or your state, or beyond. Think about people like Lewis and his buddy Clark. As they trekked mapless across the continent it was pretty much all nooks and crannies. But, let’s go further, let’s say a place full of nooks and crannies can be your own mind and soul, your memories and your stories.

My adventure for now is sleuthing for goodness, truth and beauty in our modern day culture and in myself. I’m going to confess some despair, because in the thin, wide open, garishly-lit places of the 24-hour news cycles, politics, religion, social media, pop-culture, etc. I’m not finding much; goodness, truth, beauty that is. So, these must surely be in the nooks and crannies. I know they haven’t gone away completely. It’s just that most everything else is so loud, chaotic, shrill, flashing, strobing, grating, grinding, shallow, deceptive, false and dissimulating.

It sounds like I’m describing the Las Vegas strip. It’s kind of pretentious like that, but more pervasive and sneaky and ugly. I’ve been to Vegas twice: once for a trade show, once to accept an award for a web design project. I don’t like it at all. It’s not that I’m taking some moral highground, but I’ve been to Paris. I’ve been to New York many times. I would suggest that if you want to experience either, go there; not to some gaudy Vegas charade of those two great cities. (Although I would recommend seeing the 1963 film “Charade” starring Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn.)

Excuse me while I get my train back on the tracks.

Do you find all of this—our current state of affairs—a bit disorienting? I do. Do you sort of despise the “new normal”? I do. Do you long for something solid that you can count on? I realize this is beginning to sound like a set up for some product I’m selling like an herb or oil or potion, like a wand Harry or Hermione might have, or maybe a book or a sermon. Sorry.

I do have this though: there is goodness, truth and beauty all around us. There is a certain joy in the search and in the discovery. Looking in the nooks and crannies always promises a eureka moment. I often find them in song lyrics like this scripture turned popular song:

To everything (turn, turn, turn)
There is a season (turn, turn, turn)
And a time to every purpose, under heaven

Or, in a verse:

“So I say to you: Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you.” —Jesus

Sometimes we can find them vicariously. Surely by now you’ve heard the stories of Steve Hartman. He is the Sherlock Holmes of uncovering goodness, truth and beauty; along the road. Here is his Facebook page. Click and rejoice. Discover them through Steve’s encounters.

Where do you find goodness, truth and beauty?

HANDS, LIPS & THE DEVIL

MY MATERNAL GRANDMOTHER was a fount of wisdom and warnings: Play with fire and you’ll wet the bed. Hike in the woods and you’ll get a chigger on your wigger. And, one I heard often: Idle hands are the devil’s workshop. Each of her warnings was uttered with the authority of divine edict, or certainly, scriptural backing.

I’ve done a bit of Bible reading over my life and can’t remember a reference to bed-wetting, chiggers or wiggers (unless you count all that circumcision stuff). The line about idle hands didn’t appear in any version of the Bible until 1971, The Living Bible version, published that year, intrepreted Proverbs 16:27 as, “Idle hands are the devil’s workshop; idle lips are his mouthpiece.” My grandmother was proclaiming this truth long before 1971.

I bring this up for a couple of reasons. #1) On that loose lips part, you should read what I wrote and was going to post before I chose to write this! #2) Apparently that idle-hands thing took root. I try to keep my hands busy so the devil’s workshop remains closed.

This also serves to meet the warning of my mentor and guide through the aging process who said that every old guy needs a hobby in retirement; or else. Retirement is at hand, so I’m trying to find ways to keep mine busy doing something besides running the TV remote and writing stuff that will get me in trouble. I’ve also discovered that if I don’t keep my hands busy, sometimes My Amazing Missus will find ways for me to get them busy.

I don’t play golf. I would play tennis but I think I’m too good to play with the old geezers. I don’t like yardwork, or sawdust. I like flyfishing but I live in central Oklahoma. The only trout you’ll find around here are in the freezer at the grocery store. I play my drums, but how much of that can we all stand?

So, I’m trying my hands at leatherwork. I did a bit of that back in the 60s and really enjoyed it. So why wouldn’t it work in my 60s.

Recently I made a leather case for a bottle of essential oil. It turned out well so I’ve made a few more.

My latest project was a bit more challenging. I decide to make a bag for My Amazing Missus. When I started on the project I thought, if this goes well I might make a few more and see if I could sell them to help support my hobby. The bag is done. Based on the work/time/materials, I think I’ll price them at $14,329.00 (including shipping). In other words: I don’t plan to make another one.

I don’t know what I’ll do with all the stuff I’m making but at least my hands are busy; some of the time.

Coaster set and holder

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FOR TODAY

TODAY IT SEEMS ESPECIALLY CRUEL. I’m not much of a socializer. It’s not that I’m shy or too sophisticated for small talk, or uninterested in the lives of others—well maybe a little. Let’s just say that when it comes to the social distancing part of quarantine, I’m okay. Except! When it comes to our kids and GrandKids; and Mom, especially today.

On May 12, we sang Happy Birthday to Malachi on a Zoom call. It broke my heart. I’m grateful for Zoom and FaceTime and for kids who are doing what they can to help us stay in “touch” with the GKs. But this is hard. Sunday, was Karlee’s piano recital. I’ve never missed one; until now. Oh, we watched on YouTube and it was wonderful, but different.

Today though it seems especially cruel. Today would have been Mom and Dad’s 74th wedding anniversary. This will be her first one without him. It will be her first one without anyone from her family being physically there with her. She is in assisted-living with strict lockdown. It is as it should be for now, but hard nonetheless.

I’ve thought about how it might be different for her if Dad were still here. Their life was pretty well suited to a quarantine type existence. They started each morning the same. Dad would be up first, his coffee made, waiting for her to start their daily readings. His eyes failed him years ago so reading was impossible, but he had mom. They would start with their daily devotional book and move on to the daily newspaper, page A1 headlines first and then the sports page (a routine she follows to this day, although the sports page is not what it once was). They would have been fine as long as Gunsmoke, M*A*S*H, and Jeopardy were on. The turmoil of quarantine would have hit once the scheduled St. Louis Cardinals’ game didn’t begin.

For a lot of 90-somethings you could have played any old Cardinals game from the past. They wouldn’t have known that Ozzie retired years ago. But Dad did. Mom served as a sort of play-by-play announcer for him. She knew all the players. She probably wouldn’t pronounce their names correctly but she knew them. Dad could see enough that he could tell the Cardinals players apart. I don’t know if he recognized their silouette, their batter’s box routine, their pitching motion?

But the Cardinal’s aren’t playing for now. Mom has a wonderful team of care-givers where she lives. For now, for today that will be enough for her. She is resilient. She has her books, her eyesight and GrandKids who love her. As she says, quoting her own mother, “This too shall pass.”

But for today; it seems especially cruel.

O WORDS, WHERE ARE YOU

IT’S LIKE MY WORDS ARE QUARANTINED TOO. For days now I’ve written nothing in a journal. I’ve tried. I’ve doodled some. I want to write something, something profound that some day someone will find and say, “Look, here’s a journal from The Quarantine of 2020! Wait, all it says, page after page is, ‘the same as yesterday.’”

Numerous times I’ve sat, fingers hovering just above the keyboard, quivering, waiting for the brain to send a message to those fingers to type something. There should be plenty to say. There’s certainly time to say it. But, the words don’t come. And when they don’t, this kind of stuff gets published on a blog.

In my conceited opinion, there isn’t much good TV programming being created these days. There is no original Law & Order, no Seinfeld, no Parks & Recreation, no King of Queens, no Big Bang Theory… So I watch reruns. Actually I’m watching very little TV. YouTube, Yes; TV no. But when I do, it’s reruns. Recently I watched an episode of Frasier. (Where is a show like that when we need it?) In this episode, Frasier was going to be out for a time from his radio gig. So they were going to air the best of Dr. Frasier Crane for his listeners.

Then it hit me. I’ve been writing this blog sporadically like five years now. That’s pretty long in blog years. Surely there is some “best of” stuff I could re-air. Fortunately the blog utility I use offers all kinds of analytics including “Most popular posts”.

The most popular ever was a post about selling our first Airstream, Bambi. That post was listed on a highly-trafficed website so it’s popularity is skewed somewhat. So, we’ll eliminate it. Other than that one, here are the top three. You can click on the title to see the post if your self-quaranteed and bored out of your mind. I noticed these are from 2017, 2015, and 2016 respectively. Apparently the oldies are the goldies.

CHECKING THE BOXES

THE PEACOCK VOW

LOVE STORIES

So, there you have a few reruns you can check out. In the meantime, so I have something thought-provoking to share here and also to write in my journal, and while my own words fail me, I’m using the words of others.

Here are a few quotes for our time in the Big Q.

“If you are solitary be not idle.”

— Samuel Johnson

“If you’re lonely when you’re alone, you’re in bad company.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

“I have let myself go and am less strict with myself.”

— Leo Tolstoy

I had written these quotes down on a scrap of paper and I don’t remember the source. It was probably The New York Times, The New Yorker or The Atlantic, or Fox News, but probably not.

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