Retired Arkansas judge and civil rights movement veteran Judge Olly Neal tells a heartwarming story on Storycorps about how a high school librarian helped him succeed in life.
Just imagine, we have no idea how much a small, anonymous kindness may impact someone else’s life in a positive way. When Neal was a high school student with a reputation for cursing and fighting to maintain with his peers, he saw a book in the high school library that interested him, but was embarrassed to check it out. He was afraid the girls working at the checkout desk would tell his frirends that he was reading a book, and damage his tough reputation. He decided to steal the book.
Then, after he read it, he brought it back to the same spot where he had found it. Listen to Judge Neal’s story to find out what the librarian did that changed his life.
Preserving a Legacy of Experience and Inspiration
Storycorps is a fantastic project in which people’s stories are recorded while they are interviewed by a loved one. The stories are recorded, preserved and indexed, and one is broadcast on National Public Radio once a week.
Time travel to Victorian times, subtle humor, a gentle love story, a cat that is crucial to the fate of the universe, an overbearing busybody, homage to a great comic writer with a rowboat trip down the Thames, a search through time for a mysterious object called “the Bishop’s bird stump,” and a happy ending–how could you fail to be charmed by this book?
Say What, Again?
Oxford history student Ned Henry is time-lagged from traveling repeatedly between 2057 and 1940 to try to locate an object called the Bishop’s bird stump in order to placate Lady Schrapnell, who is restoring the bomb-destroyed Coventry Cathedral, and will endow the Oxford time-travel program in exchange for the historians’ help with her restoration project. In order to escape her demands and get the necessary two weeks of rest that he needs to recuperate, Ned agrees to travel to 1888 and return something that fellow student Verity Kindle brought to the future, inadvertently changing the course of history. After delivering this object, Ned will be free to relax for two weeks. In his confusion and exhaustion, he is not entirely clear about the object he is supposed to return. A comedy of errors ensues, in the course of which Ned falls in love with Verity and manages to set things right, and even finds the Bishop’s bird stump at last.
I Couldn’t Stop Laughing
Connie Willis has the kind of sense of humor that sneaks up on you, so that you read a passage, and several seconds later you burst out laughing. In this zany book, she has also put in outright slapstick comedy, such as when Our Hero, having never seen a cat, attempts unsuccessfully to catch one. The story is a lighthearted mix of genres that masks a serious plot, that will keep you absorbed, make you laugh, and leave you satisfied at the end.
There are two other books by Connie Willis related to Oxford time travelers from the same futuristic era, and they are both wonderful books that are impossible to put down, but be warned that they deal with tragic events and do not have the lighthearted silliness of To Say Nothing But the Dog. One, Doomsday Book, takes place during the Black Death of 1348, and the other, Blackout, during the bombing of England in World War II, and I love them dearly, but they will make you cry. Stick with this one for a book that will make you feel good from the first page to the last.
When life throws bad things at you that are beyond your control, how do you reach some kind of acceptance? This is a question I am still pondering regarding my recently diagnosed chronic illness. I found some excellent insight in the book Man’s Search for Meaning by Victor E. Frankl. All quotations are from the Beacon Press 2006 edition.
Victor Frankl was a respected Viennese psychiatrist who survived the horrors of four concentration camps during the Holocaust, and emerged with the idea that people can find meaning in their lives in the worst of conditions. Rabbi Harold S. Kushner describes Frankl’s most enduring insight in the Foreword, p.X:
Forces beyond your control can take away everything you possess except one thing, your freedom to choose how you will respond to the situation. You cannot control what happens to you in life, but you can always control what you will feel and do about what happens to you.
One of my current frustrations is that my health issues mandate that I follow a low carb diet. This means I must learn to live without any of my favorite foods, including anything made with sugar, flour, grain or starch. I also need to avoid chemicals and processed foods, including most restaurant and packaged foods.
Unfortunately, I have not yet mastered the art of cooking this way. I am just beginning to experiment and discover healthy yet delicious substitutes for my forbidden favorites. Here is today’s triumph–read on for the recipe.
For anybody who needs a lift today, here is an adorable video I found on YouTube, of a pile of kittens riding a Roomba vacuum, edited by another YouTube user to add the accompaniment of a Beethoven symphony.
Now if only I had a robotic maid to clean my house for me. Or maybe I just need a really smart and well-trained cat.
How often do you indulge in doomsday thinking? I’m sure you know how this works.
You get a lower grade on a test than you were expecting, such as a C instead of an A, and suddenly the realization dawns on you that you are stupid. In fact, you have been stupid all along and somehow failed to notice it until just now, probably because you are too stupid. Naturally you are going to fail the class, which will cause you to get chucked out of school completely. Then of course you will never be able to qualify for any job, being the stupid dropout that you are. You will end up as a homeless lady pushing an abandoned shopping cart full of salvaged bits of soggy cardboard, sleeping on a park bench with 27 stray cats, where you will die alone of alcoholism and exposure.
This is so cute, I had to share. Be the Pig of Happiness, learn to dance in the rain, and leak happiness onto all your friends. Watch the animated YouTube video from Edward Monkton below.
Perhaps this pig seems a wee bit manic, but I couldn’t resist smiling at him anyway, so he is actually doing quite well at spreading happiness everywhere he goes. A positive outlook makes such a big difference in how we perceive reality–if we are looking for positive things, we will see the ones that are already there.
Besides which, this made me giggle. Long live silliness!
Outlander (U.S. title, also published as Cross-Stitch in the U.K.), has stayed firmly at the top of my list of favorite books of all time for the last several years. Actually, I include Gabaldon’s entire Outlander series in that category, but if you have never yet had the pleasure of losing yourself in these books, you absolutely must start with the first one and read them in order.
If you have somehow escaped the addictive magnetic pull of these books so far, you are in for an enormous treat. I wish I could unread them just to have the joy of discovering them again for the first time.
Have you ever had one of those days where you’ve just run errands at the bank, the post office and the gas station on your way to work, and by then you were running late and had trouble finding a parking place, so you dashed into work just in time for a staff meeting, only to have a coworker tell you discreetly, afterwards, that the back of your skirt is tucked into the top of your pantyhose? And then you wanted to just crawl in a hole and die–any hole, as long as it was out of sight of other people? In fact, you thought, why can’t the earth just open up and swallow me right now?
I almost added “dropped the kids off” to your list of errands, but if your kids saw you like that, they would either have gleefully pointed it out, or been giggling in the backseat all the way to school, and you would have wondered what they were up to in time to salvage the rest of your dignity.
Last week I introduced a study that claims that women on average are becoming progressively less happy over time, and are less happy than men. Here are links to other sites that have commented on that study and its results.
Please chime in with your own comments and opinions on the study, on your own happiness, and on what you think would make you happier than you already are.
Opinions on the Wolfers and Stevens Study on the Declining Happiness of Women
, takes place during the Black Death of 1348, and the other, 
, during the bombing of England in World War II, and I love them dearly, but they will make you cry. Stick with this one for a book that will make you feel good from the first page to the last.
