We're back and booked.

Yesterday, our internet was down almost the whole day! Some new fiber optic doo-dad, that was supposed to be “intermittent,” but, yeah, I know how that goes.

So missed my daily post, but had a chance to read a few more books that are piling up on the tables. And instead of something new, let me today share with you some gems from previous posts on the subject of a quite supreme jewel of life, according to me :BOOKS. Both of these posts were from Blogger, where I ran my blog from 2008 to 2016. There’s a whole lot of gems there, I think, although, granted, I am biased.

1

A post in 2015 - here - was an interview with an author with a photograph and a quote I completely understood. (Substitute the dog for a cat.)

Photo by Sally Mann in NYTimes, 6/25/15.

You can find the original interview here; it works better than the links on that older post.

2

In 2011, I made a video celebrating my book club’s 10th anniversary.

But here’s what I want to say about that. Looking over that video just now, my heart was tugged. Not only because I can see just how we’ve all grown older (duh), but there are friends with whom we’ve grown older together forming long-lasting friendships. There are some who left book club along the way, and it’s just nice to see them again. There are reminders of the darn good books we read and talked about. (We also ate - A LOT - and gossiped and laughed and shared - the things that girlfriends do so well. The books were vehicles, connections, and fodder for conversation and thought. We saw transitions: marriages, babies, moves, the unexpected death of a young member, retirements and celebrations…all the usual for longstanding fellowship. The pandemic curtailed us; we tried to Zoom with limited success, and recently we’ve decided to meet far less often than what was monthly. People move on; they move away. Their priorities change. But a twenty year friendship with a dozen-a-year gatherings means so much in a retrospect. So thank you for indulging me this little vid. The quality of the video is poor, I got the music credits wrong, and I left it pretty much to Animoto to create. Friends having fun talking about books.

3

Finally, I think you need a poem today.

Sitting under an apple tree

An apple fell and hit my knee.

I jumped up and hit my head

Then fell over as though I was dead.

I got up and banged my arm

And then rolled down into the barn.

I gave out a humongous shout

And in a minute my mom came out.

She looked at me and stepped on the cat

Who bit the dog, whoo scared the rat

That ran across the kitchen floor

Who scared the main who broke the screen door

That tripped my dad, who made a fuss!

All of these things happened to us

Just because of one little tree

That dropped an apple on my knee.

Leigh Ryan, 3rd grade, 1988.