The other side of the street.

I have preferred to have a pencil in hand at work. I have been guilty of biting my pencils, a lot. Likewise I like longer pencils and I like to keep them sharp. Electric pencil sharpeners are useful. Good erasers are a plus. I have a few journals near my desk at home. The one I open the most is my running log. Looking over at the journals I notice the running one and find that I also have inside this one "several sections". The first section, after the running section, is titled "Funny". The first page has a cartoon showing a cow laying on a couch in a Head Dr's Office. The caption says, "No, I wouldn't call you a mad cow exactly- I'd say you're a cow with issues". Truth is I have meet a number of those folks over the years. Another says, "For the next 27 days I'll be conducting a non-stop sales meeting on why we're not making enough sales calls". The next tab is titled "Correspondence with friends and family". This one is pretty weak since my contacts files in my email are hundreds of times larger. Next is "Thoughts and Poems" Some of these I wrote. Some are quote copies. Most are in a larger file on the desktop. The next is "Friends Past". Pictures............ Mark L., Norris W., a note from Garr, a cousin, and a cute little boy from the past. Somewhere I have a picture of Klppinburt standing by his 1940 something K whopper I need to find and get in this book. Not a lot of stuff really but somewhere to park the pictures. I do have others. A little book titled "Notes on Trip to Korea" another titled "Daily thoughts, Family Photos. ect". In this one I have a section where I just wrote whatever I thought of on some days. On 1/20/08 I wrote "Monday Tomorrow is KJ's birthday." Another section on Family where I pasted in a picture of a Pillsbury Doughboy getting run over by a big old steam roller. One person for sure will laugh again when she reads this. Below I have three larger books. Each is a picture album. Then another is a bunch of stuff on history of some relatives. A little to the right of these books are a dozen or so binders full of stuff.

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Last night I was reading a book about reading, again. Ann Q. wrote this little book and it is interesting to see her present her love of reading by telling the reader over and over that she grew up loving reading more than anything else. She claimed that as a youth she would prefer to stay inside and read to anything. I think that would have been fine but then I can't claim that anything like that was true for me. I enjoyed getting out and my challenge was trying to see what the world really was.

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Asked about "social structure" for a project by a great young man I wondered a bit if we can really move our own social structure. I recall how motivating it was as a young person to visit cousins I had who had lived in many places across the country and seemed to really be into books by the way. It was clear to me that they lived in a world that I didn't know and I wanted to move into that world.

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The key to moving in a positive direction in life is knowledge. Even, no I think especially knowledge of what is on the other side of the street is critical. For the author who loved reading more than anything it was a tool to seeing the other side of the street. One ought to. and in my opinion should want to know more, to learn more, to understand more, to be able to think deeper.