Joy: Ink on my Hands

Please Honk if any other writer under the age of 40 understands the joy I feel because ink stains my fingers this morning? With the advent of computers it has been…years! Yes I realize I am showing my age rejoicing in ink-stained hands, but there is something decorative about it to me and ON me. There was I time, way before this year 2011 came to be that I did not emerge from a day’s work without ink covering my fingers, sometimes my clothes, my desk, or even on my face from where I might have wiped a tear from writing.

Everyone is typing on computers mostly now. I love my computer; do not get me wrong. I have saved more paper in the past 20 years than I can estimate. There is hardly any reason to print most things anymore, even, and this is a good thing. Articles, documents, letters, they can all be emailed or sent as ‘copy; or what ever they call it now? Ohhhh but there was a time, and it was not so long ago when a writer’s world was covered in errant ink. Those days are gone for the most part and good riddance I must admit. I cannot help laugh at myself with the correlation of our grandparents telling us how they used to have “walk a mile to the library” and all that corny stuff.

Well! Today I succumbed to hand-scribing words, and lo and behold, yes, I have ink stains on my fingers I want to lick them it is so memorable.

Nostalgic? Yes. Ridiculous pleasure? Perhaps.

No matter…I did my work by hand today, and I will revel in the ink-stained fingers such an old-fashioned writer dealt with in times long past. No one can tell my occupation anymore because my hands are so clean as a rule. That is just fine with me. Just the same I want to lick this ink from my fingers for old-time’s sake…except I do not want it gone, just yet.

--PPM

Friends

Me and Euphemisms (phrase coined by FCM)

12 October 2011

Friends are the best. My dear friend and cousin coined a phrase yesterday with which I will always be enamored. We were having fun chatting when unintentionally, out came a comment only she and I could have understood at that moment in context. Wish I could remember the phrase but it was worth the good wholesome gut-belly laugh it inspired. That would have been fine enough for me; laughing is lovely alone. Then equally inspiring her quick savvy mind quipped:

That is a me and you-phenism.

Thank you, Florence. If I had laughed any harder I would have split in two. We were doubled-over wiping the tears from under our eyes. Sweet joy! Brilliant I thought, simply brilliant. And of course she is brilliant.

A visual artist and Renaissance woman by Nature, she has a way with words which rival the master writers. Writing is not her occupation. She has a full-time job totally unrelated to the arts. Her talents have no boundary. She can design a glorious garden; toss pottery on a wheel; tell me why my dog is acting the way he is. She can paint a portrait, a simple sketch or an entire mural with panache, and at the same time, she can take on the responsibility of yet another down-trodden underfed horse and within months have that horse looking like a show-pony, snuggling with Love. Oh, and she loves to play. Despite her pockets being full of talents and tasks, still she will take time to fly a kite with our child, or fill up the kiddy pool or pull out the bubble-sets, etcetera. She does not hesitate to let the tools scatter when our friend’s children ask, “May we pull out every piece of art paper and crayon you have?”

How does she find the time?

She finds Time in the most important art of all: the art of caring. Among her many gifts, perhaps one I cherish most is her savoir-faire for engaging a listener into a gut-wrenching laugh with bliss. For this, dear reader, I am thankful for the love of all things loveable. I am grateful for friends.

--PPM

Tornadoes and Coffee

Tornadoes and Coffee

Written 30 April 2010

Both took the same amount of time. A rampant tornado blazed through Alabama killing more than 200 people at the exact same time I was getting angry pilfering through our cabinets looking for coffee which we were out of apparently. I had not heard the news yet of death and destruction. Coffee was on my mind. I was thinking about coffee?

Difficult to reconcile those two concepts to me now, but indeed they happened in tandem. Finally I know how ridiculous I am.

In that coffee-bereft moment, little did I know my native people were not pilfering for coffee. No. They were searching for lost loved ones, rambling through the rubble of their homes, their livelihoods, hoping for something, anything, a family picture, a memento, a scrap of life as they knew it a minute ago. Imagine! All this at that same time I was getting angry because we were out of coffee? That was a personal disaster in itself. I do not understand myself or anything else sometimes.

There is nothing simple about that moment in my mind. Like war, earthquakes, tsunamis and cancer and unrest, I must live with that message forever: how quickly an event can change life.

My lack of coffee became so selfish, so mute upon such news of Real Loss that day.

With luck, as I sip my coffee this morning, I have learned to be more grateful. I thought I was sooooo grateful for my peaceful life, and yet there is more to be grateful for, always. With luck, I learned the mere joy of being able to sip coffee, much less to have food to eat, people to love, and a loving home to greet. With luck I will retain a snippet of wisdom from such a tragic event?

Yet the truth remains about how I felt that morning. I am stuck forever with a moment that confirms I am ridiculous. Coffee? My home is in tact. My family is alive and well. Yet by being unaware of what was happening in the world around me I got miffed about absence of coffee. Please forgive me. Simple things bring me pleasure. But Life is not so simple when someone such as I, who craves simplicity, could be so disheartened because I am out of coffee one morning, unaware.

--PPM

Vignettes from the Neighborly-hood

Vignettes from the Neighborly-hood

By Paige Ponder Monaghan

One Knows One Lives in a Small Town Again,

When…

27 September 2011

A little green truck passed by

Oak Street

this morning. These oaks, ahhh these oaks! They drip with tendrils of sterling Spanish moss, a bromeliad relative of the pineapple family, and canopy a southern road called Oak Street, obviously. The image is embedded. The Spanish moss cliché would be over-done almost if not for its truly laden loveliness, for its old-roots timelessness, sparkling in the morning dew.

This morning I heard this soothing verbal transaction, which made me appreciate my native land which I left for college and after that, traveled farther, for nearly the same reason I returned: everything and everybody so connected. But there I sat on my friend’s front porch. We do not have a neighbor within earshot at my house now which is why I thank goodness for gunshot if needs be. But anyway…this is what I over-heard.

The driver of the lil’ green truck had slowed to a rooooowlling-stop, then hollered out his window at the neighbor next door to where I was rocking on the porch, watching the rain.

The little green truck driver hollered, “Hey, Will! Nora’s car window is down.” The man next door was outside pulling weeds while the rain held. Understandable, weeds give-way much easier from moist soil.

He lifted his head from the weeds in the rain just long enough to holler back, “Hey, thanks, Bill. I’ll get it.” And with that the lil’ green truck drove on its way. It was a ‘Good Morning to you’ of sorts. It just held more information is all.

I live in my native county now, after decades of traveling away from it. I live in a place I thought I would not ever be again, a place I love despite the grandeur of experiencing so many other, different places and countries. With such a huge family clan and distinct circle of friends I was flying home to visit most of the time anyway. Now, here I am, back again, LIVING here and I like it. At least I think I like it?

In a small town no one spats on the ground. Oh heavens no, at least not in front of someone who might tell their momma. I like that. In a small town, everyone says ‘yes, ma’am’ and ‘yes, sir’ innately. With that I have no bother. That moment struck me like lightning: the people in our sleepy town are kind enough to stop to say ‘your wife’s car window is down.’

It tugs at my heartstrings; it pulls them up to my mind, and I realize, my roots are here, every bit as deep as those weed’s roots are and perhaps deeper than the oaks.

I live in a small town again, and I like it here.                             –PPM

Polo at the Point by Paige Ponder Monaghan

http://alabama-magazine.com/node/213

Polo at the Point article in ALABAMA MAGAZINE this month, March 2011... please subscribe.

Ponder Publishing Company, LLC: Link List

Ponder Publishing Company, LLC: Link List

Ode to Langston Hughes

Ode to Langston Hughes

By Paige Ponder Monaghan
09 December 09, 9:11 AM Wednesday

I’ve know Rivers too, yet not the
same as some
alas!

Despite
I have to laugh
because
it takes so many times for me to learn
in life, at last
the words someone said which I probably
read because now
they are dead…
that it is true
You can never step in the same river twice.