Right now we have a fall morning chill at 65°, but the day will get warmer and will reach the 70’s. Through the trees in the back yard, I can see blue sky. The sunlight is dappling through the oak leaves. This is a lovely morning.

My father always carried a white handkerchief in his back pocket. In the old days, before we had a dryer, my mother used to iron his handkerchiefs. When I was young, I always gave him new ones for Christmas which I’d buy in a fancy package at the drug store. I remember the nuns too used white handkerchiefs. They used to tuck them under their sleeves at their wrists. A small corner of the white handkerchief usually stuck out for quick retrieval.

I have old fingers. A couple are arthritic which translates into trouble opening some bottle tops, especially the ones where you have to press in each side at the designated marks at the same time then turn the top. I have gotten so frustrated I have thrown the bottle. It travels far. My last resort is usually breaking the top with pliers. I use a fork to pull the sort of key on the tops of dog food cans. That works well. Sometimes, though, I just can’t get the bottles opened. They either sit in the cabinet until their expiration date or they get tossed. Getting old has its challenges.

In grammar school, I wore tie shoes. My mother had taught me how to tie bows when I was around five. My first bows were so loose they fell apart. I’d tie them tighter, and they’d become knots. That was sort of a Goldilocks experience of trying to find just right. It took me a while, but I finally mastered the art of tying bows.

We used to have reading class. We had thick readers with stories followed by questions. The stories were interesting. The questions were chronological and easy to look up if you forgot the answers. We used to get graded on silent reading. I always got an S for satisfactory. I figured if your lips didn’t move or your finger stayed off the text you got that S.

Over the blackboards in most of my grammar school classrooms were two rows of letters. It was the alphabet, A to Z, in cursive. The upper case, capital letters, had their lower case, small letters, right beside them. All the capital letters were fancy, but I thought the weirdest looking letters were Q, X and Z. It was a good thing we didn’t use them often.

This entry was posted on September 3, 2024 at 12:17 pm and is filed under Musings. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. Both comments and pings are currently closed.