Trust Your Instincts

                Vincent VanGough wrote to his brother Theo and mentioned he had painted “Sunset at Montmajour” on July 4, 1888. Apparently he wasn’t too pleased with the result. According to an article by Toby Sterling (Associated Press), the artist shipped the painting to his brother and in 1908 it found its way to a neophyte art collector. Unfortunately the Norwegian industrialist/collector was told by a so-called expert that the painting was a fake and so it languished in the collector’s attic until it was discovered as part of his estate in 1970. It was then determined that the painting was an original VanGough after all.

                There’s a lesson there for me in that sad story. If the collector had valued the painting because it spoke to him in some way, if the brush strokes captured his imagination, or simply made him feel good, perhaps he would have ignored the erroneous appraisal and hung the painting where he could enjoy it. Something must have caught his eye for him to have purchased it in the first place. But because someone else denigrated it as a mere copy, the work of art was relegated to obscurity and the owner lost almost 70 years of pleasure. How sad. For that collector, its value lay only in its provenance and not its intrinsic beauty. A rather shallow assessment if you ask me.

                Here’s to the “stuff” we love! Beauty is in the eye of the beholder and “worth” has many levels, money being sometimes the lowest for those who trust and value their personal preferences over cash. 

               

Good As New (Almost)

                My arm was immobilized for only about a month after my wrist encountered the sidewalk in a most unfortunate manner. The Colles fracture required surgery and then physiotherapy. I had no idea my fingers could become contracted so quickly! I told my digits to stand up straight, darn it! but they were having none of it. My arm was so weak I couldn’t hold a plate or use a knife to cut my food. And this was only four weeks after the break. I was amazed.  

Even though I had had professional discussions with physical therapists regarding my patients over the years, actually receiving therapy myself was scary. I had a mental image of enduring excruciating exercises while a therapist shouts brutal encouragement. I didn’t know what to expect on my first visit but I was pretty sure it would involve pain, and lots of it.

                September 8^th was National Physical Therapy Day and I’m writing this blog as a huge thank you to my physical therapist. There was no pain, but a lot of gain. I dutifully did my daily exercises at home and during my sessions  was amazed at the weekly, sometimes even daily, improvement. My therapist never shouted; he gently pushed the envelope and voila! I’ m almost as good as new. 

                Although everyone on the health care team contributes to returning a person to wellness, it’s the physical therapist, often the last in the treatment line, who provides the crucial final steps that help people resume their lives.

                 So here's to physical therapists everywhere. It would literally be a broken world without them.

 

 

Doggie Comfort

             

 

   Cody, my cocky Cocker, does three things when he steps out of his crate in the morning. The first is when he shakes his body so fast side to side it looks like he has only one eye. Doggie stretch follows the shake, first the front legs and paws, then the back ones. I love his third move most of all. He comes over to me and nuzzles my legs, rubbing his little self against me.

                No matter how poorly I may have slept the night before or how my day may loom like a mountain to be climbed, his morning greeting comforts me.  Dogs do that and that’s why they are welcome in hospitals, nursing homes and other places where humans stress out.

                I recently read a newspaper article by Haley Vaccaro (Albany Bureau) about comfort dogs working the courtrooms, of all places. There, “facility” dogs have a way of helping witnesses testify with less anxiety and more accuracy. In fact, according to the article, Senator Terry Gipson of Dutchess County N.Y. introduced a law that would allow these dogs in the courtrooms to offer comfort to victims and witnesses. The potential law is named after the dog “Rosie” who helped a terrified teen who was on the witness stand. The girl froze when asked to point out her assailant. When Rosie gently nudged the girl’s arm with her snout, she was able to point to her father.

                What a great way for dogs to add even more comfort to peoples’ lives than they already do. They warn us when strangers approach, somehow know when we need a nuzzle; they fetch, herd, protect and generally adopt their people pack with more loyalty and love than I think we sometimes deserve.

                I think we would be amazed at what goes on between those pointy or floppity ears.

The Good Old Days

                If you’re looking for a great non-fiction easy summer read, I suggest The Good Old Days-They Were Terrible! by Otto L. Bettmann.  Each glimpse into some aspect of the 19^th century covers only two pages, so it’s a book you can grab and put down throughout the day – or get lost in for a few hours.

                The entry about summer makes one appreciate the invention of the window screen in the 1880’s. Imagine flies and mosquitoes all over your food, nesting on you and your bedding at night, getting into your food and drink! Children were given leafy branches to shoo them away while family members tried to eat a meal in peace and without bug garnishes.

                Bettmann quotes Russel Lynes who said screens were, “the most humane contribution the 19th century made to the preservation of sanity and good temper.”

                And then there were the electric trolleys. I’ve been on delightful trolley rides but my experiences are a far cry from the 19^th century trolleys which at best, reached a max of 25 miles per hour. Not even considering the spaghetti of overhead wires, the trolleys made little progress through the busy streets because they followed horse drawn vehicles or waited while they clopped across the rail. A photo of a Chicago intersection showed a pile up of huge proportion with trolleys, trucks, people and horses milling in the road. H.G Wells called the Chicago streets “one horse cry for discipline.”

                Other topics in the book include housing, air, work, crime, food and drink, health, etc. Being your full service blogger, I checked and it is available at Amazon and Amazon Prime as well as in our area libraries for local readers.

Enjoy!

Prim

                I like country style décor with the cozy, comfy look old things like quilts, candles, and firkins give a room. My favorite magazine features several homes in country style and is full of ways to get what they call “the look.”

            There is a country style called “primitive” or just “prim” for short and it’s what I would call hard core country style. You couldn’t find an upholstered chair or a cabinet that didn’t look like someone took chains to it, to save your life. The more beat up, rusted, many paint layered, the furnishings are, the better. The home owners tell of buying, say, a 20^th century ranch home and removing the carpeting and wall paper. They cover refrigerators with barn wood and take down the matching cabinets in the kitchen to replace them with odd cupboards or a wooden box, its bottom nailed to the wall, to house ancient crockery. With a lot of hard work, historical study, and dedicated salvaging, they create a home worthy of the 19^th century’s best from the hollers of Appalachia.

            I was discussing this primitive style with a friend who was born and raised in Appalachia.  She became a nurse and settled here in upstate New York. In a soft voice that still harbored a hint of a southern accent, she chuckled and said, “I worked very hard to get away from that look.”

            For her, that was all her family could afford. For others, it’s the height of period correct décor and worth every penny invested.

Our personal spaces are as unique as we are, aren’t they?

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Melborp

                Parents and students are stocking up on note paper, notebooks, glitter, glue and goodness knows what else in preparation for the start of a new school year next month. I don’t recall such a mass purchase-a-thon when I was a kid. Back in the dark ages all we had to buy was notebooks, paper and a few pens. Looking back and comparing all the extras kids in even the most fiscally strapped schools today have with what I had, one can only wonder how I learned anything at all.

                Here was my school day for eight years. Lining up in silence outside and entering the school in subdued rows (kind of like prisoners going to the chain gang.) Lessons in one classroom with one teacher until lunch – which we brown bagged and ate at our desks. That’s right – no cafeteria. No library for that matter, unless you called the bookcases in some of the classrooms a library. Then we ran around outside on the theory we needed exercise. You guessed it – no gym either. Back to more classes in the same room with the same teacher, followed by about three hours of homework it was worth your life not to complete. Eight years of that. Kind of builds up a high level of tolerance in a person, doesn’t it? 

                That would constitute an academic problem of giant proportion today but a funny thing happened on the way to blessed release, uhmm, “graduation.”

 I learned to learn. How to teach myself was a life lesson I figured out pretty much on my own because no teacher ever attempted to make learning fun or interesting. They just scared me to death and piled on the assignments. So maybe that eight year sentence to academic hell wasn’t a problem after all but a non-problem, a “melborp” (problem spelled backward), because a surprisingly good outcome came from a bad situation.

 

What a Name!

                In one of the Big Bang episodes, Sheldon Cooper acquired a bunch of cats when what passes for his love life hit a bump in the road.  As he explained to his flabbergasted mother, the “bunch” of cats is more correctly called a “Clowder” or a “Glare.”

                 Who knew?

                That got me wondering what other strange names we attach to animals based on their species, age or sex. Turning to the internet, here’s a sampling of some of the really weird attributions.

A congregation of alligators

A raft of Auks

A cete of badgers

A cloud of bats

A sleuth of bears

A sute of bloodhounds

A wake of Buzzards

A peep of chickens

A lap of Cod

 A bed of clams

A quiver of cobras

A bask of crocodiles

A convocation or aerie of eagles

A leash of fox

A tower of giraffes

A cackle of hyenas

A crash of rhinos

Just to name a few, but my favorite is:  a  Murder of Crows  - It makes me think of  Edgar Allan Poe.