Day 14: How Time Flies When You're Having Fun....Blogging!

Ha...I've done two weeks' worth of daily blogs as of today. Glory be! I'm back home and catching up with my correspondence and other things. Had a swell time at Sally's during graduation weekend. She and Jay are so kind and generous and fun to be with. Their friends all love them. And Sam's all graduated from high school! What a challenge high school is for kids! Some sail through without a hitch, but others--most others--struggle in many ways. I didn't exactly struggle, but I generally hated it. The classes bored me out of my skull, and I was never destined to be a popular girl, whatever that took. I loved G.A.A. (sports) and working on the school newspaper and, later, drama, but the rest of it was a snore. One of my favorite sayings is "If you liked school, you'll LOVE work!" Most people respond to that by saying, "But I LOVED school!" Gah. In the evenings at home, I spent most of my time reading (books not on my list of required reading for school) under the covers at night and listening to "Stars from Paris" from the radio station in Moorhead at 11 p.m. I don't think I even knew WHAT Paris was or WHERE, but I loved the French singers--women, most of the time. And possibly some men, but I don't remember them.

We get through those years, but each stage is followed by the next with its own unique challenges. I was in the convent for most of the time I was in college. We didn't have a whole lot of time to study, especially if you got permission to go to early night prayer (7:30 p.m., after recreation was over). If you stayed up until regular night prayer at 9 p.m., you had at least 1.5 hours in which to study each day. But I was exhausted by then, and I often went to bed early. The classes that required the most studying were Latin and Greek. Everything else I could rely on my excellent memory to just go to classes and pass the tests without much of a sweat. But Latin and Greek required translation, and that took time to write out. We had excellent teachers, most of whom had taught every grade from kindergarten on up through college. You just had to show up in their classes to learn.

Still, if the classes were at least good, the college library was a wonder, and I spent many hours in there reading and thinking.

So...I'm thinking I should get involved in some kind of formal learning again. Photography? Sally's sister-in-law Cate is prodigiously talented in many areas--she's acted on the stage and painted and designed furniture and now is heavily into photography, which she is approaching with her unique way of bending techniques to go beyond the limits of simple vision. If I could figure out all the things my own camera can do, I might have a chance to have some serious fun taking pictures.

The artist Gauguin was surprisingly versatile in expressing his art. The recent exhibit at the National Gallery showed his fabulous work not only in painting but also in ceramics and wood carving and sculpture. That's the thing about art. It's a blast!!!