Forty Nine Quotes

The battle proved a victory - at least in part - and soon after, his grandfather finally died, and Ser Elmo became Lord of Riverrun. But he did not long enjoy his station; he died on the march forty-nine days later, leaving his young son, Ser Kermit, to succeed him. ~ George R R Martin

Number forty-nine has been mapped. ~ Rick Yancey

My father and mother in 1817 were forty-nine days on the road with their emigrant wagons [from Vermont] to Ohio. More than two days for each hour that I spent in the same journey. ~ Rutherford B. Hayes

What will that mean to each of you? It will mean that those of you who might have lived to be seventy-one must die at seventy. Some of you who might have lived to be eighty-six must cough up your ghost at eighty-five. That's a great age. A year more or less doesn't sound like much. When the time comes, boys, you may regret. But, you will be able to say, this year I spent well, I gave for Pip, I made a loan of life for sweet Pipkin, the fairest apple that ever almost fell too early off the harvest tree. Some of you at forty-nine must cross life off at forty-eight. Some at fifty-five must lay them down to Forever's Sleep at fifty-four. Do you catch the whole thing intact now, boys? Do you add the figures? Is the arithmetic plain? A year! Who will bid three hundred and sixty-five entire days from out his own soul, to get old Pipkin back? Think, boys. Silence. Then, speak. ~ Ray Bradbury

Not to me," I said.
Kafka wrote his first story in one night. Stendhal wrote The
Charterhouse of Parma in forty-nine days. Melville wrote Moby-
Dick in sixteen months. Flaubert spent five years on Madame
Bovary. Musil worked for eighteen years on The Man Without
Qualities and died before he could finish. Do we care about any
of that now? ~ Paul Auster

It is sound judgment to put on a bold face and play your hand for a hundred times what it is worth; forty-nine times out of fifty nobody dares to call it, and you roll in the chips. ~ Mark Twain

In general, it would be a peculiar type of 'justice' to declare a majority all the better and more just the more overwhelming it is, and to maintain abstractly that ninety-eight people abusing two persons is by far not so unjust as fifty-one people mistreating forty-nine. At this point, pure mathematics becomes simple inhumanity. ~ Carl Schmitt

The only thing that I'd rather own than Windows is English, because then I could charge you two hundred and forty-nine dollars for the right to speak it. ~ Scott McNealy

Kate, the mother of thirteen, is forty-nine; delicately made; her skin creamlike where the weather has not got at it. She is smaller than several of her children. Her legs and feet, like those of most women in this country, are beautifully shaped by shoelessness on the earth. Her eyes, which are watchful not at all for herself but for her family, are those of a small animal which expects another kick as a matter of course and which is too numbed to dodge it or even much care. She calls her children "my babies." They call her mama, treat her protectively as they might a deformed child, and love her carelessly and gaily. An old photograph shows her fiber and bearing as a young woman, and perhaps it is the relinquishment of that unusual spirit, under the beating and breakage of the past two decades, that has made her now the most abandoned of these people: more than any of them, she is lost in some solitary region of her own. She is only half sane. ~ James Agee

If people had true knowledge of the world perhaps they would not take up arms and so perhaps he could be an aggregator of information from distant places and then the world would be a more peaceful place. He had been perfectly serious. That illusion had lasted from age forty-nine to age sixty-five. And then he had come to think that what people needed, at bottom, was not only information but tales of the remote, the mysterious, dressed up as hard information. And he, like a runner, immobile in his smeared printing apron bringing it to them. Then the listeners would for a small space of time drift away into a healing place like curative waters. ~ Paulette Jiles

Did you know that the United States is ranked fiftieth in the world in life expectancy? And the forty-nine loser countries where they live longer than us...they live shackled to the tyranny of nonprofit health care. Here in America, you're not coughing up blood, little Bobby, you're coughing up freedom! ~ Bill Maher

The heart of a child can take forty-nine blows before it's damaged for ever and what's done can never be undone. ~ Paul Hoffman

If you rewrite a paragraph fifty times and forty-nine of them are terrible, that's fine; you only need to get it right once. ~ Tana French

Despite an unimpressive first term in office, which featured huge tax cuts
for the wealthiest Americans and tax increases for everyone else, Reagan was
reelected in 1984 in an unprecedented landslide, winning forty-nine of the
fifty states against hapless Democrat Walter Mondale. While he has become
the patron saint of all Republicans, especially those who revel in wearing the
"conservative" mantle, Reagan's record is far, far removed from his rhetoric.
Despite this, the collective delusion of his supporters is best exemplified by
noted Republican speechwriter Peggy Noonan's claims, regarding his 1980
campaign promises, that they were "Done, done, done, done, done, done and
done. Every bit of it. ~ Donald Jeffries

The choice of Blaine "speaks badly for the intelligence of the mass of my party," he ruefully continued. "It may be that 'the voice of the people is the voice of God' in fifty one cases out of a hundred; but in the remaining forty nine it is quite as likely to be the voice of the devil, or, what is still worse, the voice of a fool." Still, ~ Doris Kearns Goodwin

One animal died and, after it tested positive for Reston virus, forty-nine others housed in the same room were "euthanized" as a precaution. (Most of those, tested posthumously, were negative.) Ten employees who had helped unload and handle the monkeys were also screened for infection, and they also tested negative, but none of them were euthanized. ~ David Quammen

Today, 9 May, exactly forty-nine months and three days after the Fascist attack on Yugoslavia, the most powerful aggressive force in Europe, Germany, has capitulated. ~ Josip Broz Tito

From forty-nine to fifty-six this aloneness becomes your focus of being. Everything else in the world loses meaning. The only remaining meaningful thing is this aloneness. From fifty-six to sixty-three you become absolutely what you are going to become: the potential blossoms, and from sixty-three to seventy you start getting ready to drop the body. Now you know you are not the body, you know you are not the mind either. The body was known as separate from you somewhere around the time when you were thirty-five. That the mind is separate from you was known near the time when you were forty-nine. Now, everything else drops except the witnessing self. Just the pure awareness, the flame of awareness remains with you - and this is the preparation for death. ~ Osho

If you think success is about so many more things and is so much more arbitrary, then you can be much more open to the idea that you can be Ben Fountain and publish your great book at forty-nine. ~ Malcolm Gladwell

Eric lifted the long lock of hair that he dyed a different vibrant color every forty-nine days without fail and stared at it. His memory had served him correctly. It was currently cobalt blue - the exact same shade as the under-layer of her hair. What were the chances? It had to be kismet. Destiny. Fate. Providence. All of the above ...
She'd said her name was Rebekah. That was Eric's favorite name. At least, now it was. ~ Olivia Cunning

I'm forty-nine but I could be twenty-five except for my face and my legs. ~ Nadine Gordimer

Let me share a famous life history with you. This was a man who failed in business at the age of twenty-one; was defeated in a legislative race at age twenty-two; failed again in business at age twenty-four; had his sweetheart die when he was age twennty-six; had a nervous breakdown at age twenty-seven; lost a congressional race at age thirty-four; lost a senatorial race at age forty-five; failed in an effort to become vice-president at age forty-seven; lost a senatorial race at age forty-nine; and was elected president of the United States at age fifty-two. This man was Abraham Lincoln. ~ Shiv Khera

The great comfort of turning forty-nine is the realization that you are now too old to die young. ~ Paul Dickson

Dr. Bone Specialist came in, made me stand up and hobble across the room, checked my reflexes, and then made me lie down on the table. He bent my right knee this way and that, up and down, all the way out to the side and in. Then he did the same with my left leg. He ordered X rays then started to leave the room. I panicked. I MUST GET DRUGS.

"What can I take for the pain?" I asked him before he got out the door.

"You can take some over the counter ibuprofen," he suggested. "But I wouldn't take more than nine a day."

I choked. Nine a day? I'd been popping forty. Nine a day? Like hell. I couldn't even go to the bathroom on my own, I hadn't slept in three weeks, and my normally sunny cheery disposition had turned into that of a very rabid dog. If I didn't get good drugs and get them now, it was straight to Shooter's World and then Walgreens pharmacy for me.

"I don't think you understand," I explained. "I can't go to work. I have spent the last four days with my mother who is addicted to QVC, watching jewelry shows, doll shows and make-up shows. I almost ordered a beef-jerky maker! Give me something, or I'm going to use your calf muscles to make the first batch!"

Without further ado, he hastily scribbled out a prescription for some codeine and was gone. I was happy.

My mother, however, had lost the ability to speak. ~ Laurie Notaro

I could teach someone how to ride a motorcycle, but I couldn't teach them to do a lap of Kyalami in one minute, forty-nine seconds. You have to learn that for yourself, and the only way to learn how to go fast is to take it slow. ~ Kevin Richardson

Or consider how we citizens of rich countries obtain our oil and minerals. Teodoro Obiang, the dictator of tiny Equatorial Guinea, sells most of his country's oil to American corporations, among them Exxon Mobil, Marathon, and Hess. Although his official salary is a modest $60,000, this ruler of a country of 550,000 people is richer than Queen Elizabeth II. He owns six private jets and a $35 million house in Malibu, as well as other houses in Maryland and Cape Town and a fleet of Lamborghinis, Ferraris, and Bentleys. Most of the people over whom he rules live in extreme poverty, with a life expectancy of forty-nine and an infant mortality of eighty-seven per one thousand (this means that more than one child in twelve dies before its first birthday). ~ Peter Singer

After 1889, however, excited by rumors of "black beast rapists," Southern whites began to lynch African American men in record numbers. In 1892, the violence reached its apogee, with 161 African Americans murdered by white mobs. Ten years before, in 1882, only forty-nine black men had been lynched.8 As lynchings grew in frequency, they also grew in brutality, commonly including burnings alive, castrations, dismemberments, and other deliberate and odious tortures. ~ Gail Bederman

Identity, though, is a difficult matter to tease out, especially in a time of flux. How to tell a spaniel from a retriever when all dogs have become middle-sized and brown? Should we go by some arbitrary blood quantum wherein half makes an Indian and forty-nine percent makes something else? Certainly forty-nine percent does not a whiteman make, at least not by the laws then prevailing in our state and most others. Or do we go by the old ways, the clans and the mothers, blood degree be damned? Or by what language someone dreams in or prays in or curses in? Or whether they cook bean bread and still tell the tales of Spearfinger and Uktena by the winter fire and go to water when they're sick? And what if they did all those things but were blond and square-headed as Norsemen? Or do we just hold a dry oak leaf to their cheeks and cull by whether they are darker or lighter? ~ Charles Frazier

Every schoolmaster after the age of forty-nine, is inclined to flatulence is apt to swallow frequently and to puff ~ Harold Nicolson

In April 1962, McGeorge Bundy - the former Harvard dean and now national security adviser to President Kennedy - had Oppenheimer invited to a White House dinner honoring forty-nine Nobel laureates. At this gala affair, Oppie rubbed elbows with such other luminaries as the poet Robert Frost, the astronaut John Glenn and the writer Norman Cousins. Everyone laughed when Kennedy quipped, "I think this is the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever been gathered together at the White House, with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone." Afterwards, ~ Kai Bird

Out of forty-nine suits which he had, he never lost one but seventeen; the rest he gained with costs, double costs, treble costs sometimes; but even that did not pay. ~ Maria Edgeworth

During Aurangzeb's rule, which lasted for forty-nine years from 1658 onwards, there were many phases during which Pandits were persecuted. One of his fourteen governors, Iftikhar Khan, who ruled for four years from 1671, was particularly brutal towards the community. It was during his rule that a group of Pandits approached the ninth Sikh Guru, Tegh Bahadur, in Punjab and begged him to save their faith. He told them to return to Kashmir and tell the Mughal rulers that if they could convert him (Tegh Bahadur), all Kashmiri Pandits would accept Islam. This later led to the Guru's martyrdom, but the Pandits were saved. ~ Rahul Pandita

How many books did you get through?" he asked. She sat up in bed, brushing a few strands of long blond hair off her face. "Three hundred and forty nine." Blaise blinked. "That's very precise. Are you sure it wasn't three hundred and forty eight?" "Yes, I'm sure," she said seriously, then smiled. "In fact, it was 138,902 pages and 32,453,383 words. ~ Dima Zales

He had to reduce his age on his bio data. Otherwise, he had little chance of getting a job. Why would an Indian company employ a forty-nine-year-old when it could get two twenty-four-year-olds for the age of one forty-niner? ~ Desmond Macedo

A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where fifty-one percent of the people may take away the rights of the other forty-nine. ~ Thomas Jefferson

Me and Paul (Dean) will probably win forty games (they won forty-nine). ~ Dizzy Dean

When you die, your soul crosses the Dusk between life and the Blank Sea. The journey takes forty-nine days, ~ David Mitchell

What do you get if you multiply six by nine?"
"Six by nine. Forty two."
"That's it. That's all there is."
"I always thought something was fundamentally wrong with the universe ~ Douglas Adams

Anatole has been explaining to me the native system of government. He says the business of throwing pebbles into bowls with the most pebbles winning an election - that was Belgium's idea of fair play, but to people here it was peculiar. To the Congolese (including Anatole himself, he confessed) it seems odd that if one man gets fifty votes and the other gets forty-nine, the first one wins altogether and the second one plumb loses. That means almost half the people will be unhappy, and according to Anatole, in a village that's left halfway unhappy you haven't heard the end of it. There is sure to be trouble somewhere down the line. The ~ Barbara Kingsolver

The prophetic vision of the Temple was revealed to Ezekiel on Yom Kippur in the year 3352 (408 B.C.E.), a Jubilee Year.6 On Yom Kippur in the Jubilee Year, Jewish slaves are freed and land in Israel that had been sold during the previous forty-nine years, is returned to its original tribal ownership. ~ Chaim Clorfene

I'm like a backward berry, Unripened on the vine, For all my friends are fifty, And I'm only forty-nine. ~ Ogden Nash

He was blaming her for being sick, and she kept repeating, 'I'm forty, do you hear? I'm forty and I've been through enough. I'm forty, it was too much. ~ Ian Cross

I will not eat cakes or cookies or food. I will be thin, thin, pure. I will be pure and empty. Weight dropping off. Ninety-nine ... ninety-five ... ninety-two ... ninety. Just one more to eighty-nine. Where does it go? Where in the universe does it go? ~ Francesca Lia Block

I'm one of those actors who likes to do it wrong nine ways before I come to the tenth way, which is the way I think it should be. ~ Wayne Rogers

I ran my first marathon in Florida in 1985. I had never run more than nine miles. ~ Kim Alexis

Lucifer had been ranting his endless laundry list of complaints for forty-five minutes now, and Louhi still didn't know exactly what she was supposed to apologize for. There was something about her plant having eaten his cape while he had been waiting, as for the rest… She wished she could read an immortal's thoughts, but their brains were constructs, simulations… Which actually explained a lot. ~ Gabriele Russo

It just goes to show you: you can put nine insane miles between you and another person. You can make a vow to never speak his name. You can surgically remove someone from your life. And still, he'll haunt you. ~ Jodi Picoult

We drove. Time seemed to pass a little differently when there was nothing to mark how far you had come, or what you were heading to. I would look at my watch, thinking an hour had passed when it had only been five minutes. Or I would catch the car's clock and realized forty-five minutes had gone by in what I would have sworn was fifteen. Now that I knew what to expect from this road, it wasn't so stressful. There were still moments when the sheer aloneness of it all would cause me to have a momentary panic. But then it would subside, and I would look out the window, take in the view, and feel myself calming down. ~ Morgan Matson

By the way, I've been homeless for the past two years. Some of you may think, Aw, how sad. Others may think, Ha, ha, loser! But if you saw me on the street, ninety-nine percent of you would walk right past like I'm invisible. You'd pray, Don't let him ask me for money. ~ Rick Riordan

I have been a refugee for the last forty years in the luminous land of opportunity. Still my heart is aching with hiraeth for my native land. ~ Debasish Mridha

When George Washington ran for election to Virginia's local assembly, the House of Burgesses, in 1758, his campaign team handed out twenty-eight gallons of rum, fifty gallons of rum punch, thirty-four of wine, forty-six of beer, and two of cider - in a county with only 391 voters. ~ Tom Standage

What are you doing here?" I ask, stepping out of the car.
"Waiting for you." He closes the car door behind me. "I called you earlier and your mom said you'd be home around nine. You're two minutes early."
"Should I go away and come back?"
"What do you think?" he asks, encircling my waist with his arms. ~ Laurie Faria Stolarz

In one case out of a hundred a point is excessively discussed because it is obscure; in the ninety-nine remaining it is obscure because it is excessively discussed. ~ Edgar Allan Poe

It is the sound of the crowd that can be heard in the second, crescendoing rush of the orchestra that follows the final verse, rising from a hum to a gasp to a shout... fusing at last to a shriek (its similarity to the sound of the crowds at Beatle concerts is surely no accident). The onrushing sound of the orchestra at the end of "A Day in the Life" has transcended more than the conventions of Sgt. Pepper's Band. It is the nightmare resolution of the Beatles' show within a show. It is the sound in the eras of the high-wire artist as the ground rushes up from below. There is a blinding flash of silence, then the stunning impact of a tremendous E major piano chord that hangs in the air for a small eternity, slowly fading away, a forty-second meditation on finality that leaves each member if the audience listening with a new kind of attention and awareness to the sound of nothing at all. ~ Jonathan Gould

They said, OK, nine [Louis] Brandeis's is too much, but one is OK. So, with friends like that, and so forth. But, yes, the idea that because he was Jewish he would rule a particular way was an ugly undercurrent of the hearings, which resonates with current claims that a judge can't be impartial because of his or her background or ethnicity or race. It's, I guess, a small comfort that in the end the Brandeis vote wasn't close. ~ Jeffrey Rosen

They were about the same age, but thirty-five years might have been forty-five if Mamma's face had been a place for measuring time, while Coletta's might have been twenty-five. You saw four children in Mamma's face, you even saw Hugo there; you saw centuries of worry, ages of toil, aeons of work and distress. There was no record of children upon the face of Coletta Drigo, nor of worry, nor of distress; instead you saw a rare nuance of youth to maturity; you saw excitement; you saw great cities, happy times, the whole wonderful world; and, above all, her beauty, black hair, black eyes, the dark whitish skin. You were sure that if she had a pet it wasn't a dog but a cat, a Siamese cat. ~ John Fante

There is nothing normal about a musician's lifestyle; I don't have a nine-to-five job at the post office. ~ Robin Thicke

Linda was nine then, as I was, but we were in love ... it had all the shadings and complexities of mature adult love and maybe more, because there were not yet words for it, and because it was not yet fixed to comparisons or chronologies or the ways by which adults measure such things ... I just loved her. Even then, at nine years old, I wanted to live inside her body. I wanted to melt into her bones
that kind of love. ~ Tim O'Brien

Humans believe in so many lies that even the smallest thing becomes a big dream that makes us suffer. Usually it's just a judgment, and mainly it's a self-judgment: 'Poor me. Look what happened to me when I was nine years old. Look what happened to me last night!" Well, whatever happened in your past is not truth anymore. It could be the most horrible thing, but right now it's not the truth, because right now is the only truth you live in. Whatever happened in your past is in the virtual reality, and whatever happened to your body was healed long ago, but the mind can make you suffer and live in shame for years. ~ Miguel Ruiz

Forty minutes later, my hatred for field hockey was in full bloom, courtesy of Nikki. Whoever thought it was a good idea to combine Tag with wooden golf clubs and a rodent-size ball should be beaten senseless. ~ K.R. Conway

Being in the womb was like taking a nine-month bath. I wanted to take a shower, but no matter how hard I kicked, or how loud I screamed, my mom wouldn't listen. ~ Jarod Kintz

The rock struck Piggy a glancing blow from chin to knee; the conch exploded into a thousand white fragments and ceased to exist. Piggy, saying nothing, with no time for even a grunt, travelled through the air sideways from the rock, turning over as he went. The rock bounded twice and was lost in the forest. Piggy fell forty feet and landed on his back across that square, red rock in the sea. His head opened and stuff came out and turned red. Piggy's arms and legs twitched a bit, like a pig's after it has been killed. Then the sea breathed again in a long, slow sigh, the water boiled white and pink over the rock; and when it went, sucking back again, the body of Piggy was gone. ~ William Golding

Yet there was one problem: at the age of nine-and-ten, Laenor preferred the company of squires of his own age, and was said never to have known a woman intimately, nor to have any bastards. But to this, Grand Maester Mellos was said to have remarked, What of it? I am not fond of fish, but when fish is served, I eat it. ~ George R R Martin

Men who have reached and passed 45, have a look as if waiting for the secret of the other world, and as if they were perfectly sure of having found out the secret of this. ~ Benjamin Haydon

Yet, she said to herself, from the dawn of time odes have been sung to love; wreaths heaped and roses; and if you asked nine people out of ten they would say they wanted nothing but this
love; while the women, judging from her own experience, would all the time be feeling, This is not what we want; there is nothing more tedious, puerile, and inhumane than this; yet it is also beautiful and necessary. ~ Virginia Woolf

According to a recent report drafted by thirty-nine physicians from the Physicians for a National Health Program (PNHP) and endorsed by some 2,500 medical doctors, a movement to "a single payer system would trim administration, reduce incentives to over-treat, lower drug prices, minimize wasteful investments in redundant facilities, and eliminate almost all marketing and investor profits. These measures would yield the substantial savings needed to fund universal care and new investments in currently under-funded services and public health activities - without any net increase in national health spending." In ~ Bernie Sanders

I have recorded nine tracks for a new album which I financed myself and am looking for a home for. ~ Suzi Quatro

Make the bottlenecks work only on what will contribute to throughput today ... not nine months from now. That's one way to increase capacity at the bottlenecks. The other way you increase bottleneck capacity is to take some of the load off the bottlenecks and give it to non-bottlenecks. ~ Eliyahu M. Goldratt

I come from the Lynchs of Sligo. You know, I went there, but I looked in the phone book and there are nine million Lynches in Sligo. ~ Jack Nicholson

Ten cures for depression are to go out and do something for someone else and repeat it nine times. ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

There, you are officially mine for the next forty-eight hours. ~ Indigo Bloome

Was I bored? No, I wasn't fuckin' bored. I'm never bored. That's the trouble with everybody – you're all so bored. You've 'ad nature explained to you, and you're bored with it. You've 'ad the living body explained to you, and you're bored with it. You've 'ad the universe explained to you, and you're bored with it. So now you just want cheap thrills and like plenty of 'em, and it dun matter 'ow tawdry or vacuous they are as long as it's new, as long as it's new, as long as it flashes and fucking bleeps in forty different colours. ~ Mike Leigh

In 1970, there were approximately 330,000 prisoners in the US. Today there are 2.3 million behind bars - more than any country in the history of the world. In 2009 alone there were 1.6 million drug-related arrests in the U.S. 1.3 million of these were for possession of drugs alone. Over half were related to marijuana. The forty-year war on drugs has cost $2.5 trillion. ~ Sam Branson

We must shed the illusion that we can deliberately 'create the future of mankind' ~ Friedrich August Von Hayek

Three hundred types of mussel, a third of the world's total, live in the Smokies. Smokies mussels have terrific names, like purple wartyback, shiny pigtoe, and monkeyface pearlymussel. Unfortunately, that is where all interest in them ends. Because they are so little regarded, even by naturalists, mussels have vanished at an exceptional rate. Nearly half of all Smokies mussels species are endangered; twelve are thought to be extinct.

This ought to be a little surprising in a national park. I mean it's not as if mussels are flinging themselves under the wheels of passing cars. Still, the Smokies seem to be in the process of losing most of their mussels. The National Park Service actually has something of a tradition of making things extinct. Bryce Canyon National Park is perhaps the most interesting-certainly the most striking-example. It was founded in 1923 and in less than half a century under the Park Service's stewardship lost seven species of mammal-the white-tailed jackrabbit, prairie dog, pronghorn antelope, flying squirrel, beaver, red fox, and spotted skunk. Quite an achievement when you consider that these animals had survived in Bryce Canyon for tens of millions of years before the Park Service took an interest in them. Altogether, forty-two species of mammal have disappeared from America's national parks this century. ~ Bill Bryson

I give 110% while I am working. I know I do, because I have been doing this since I was nine. This is a way of life for me. So whether it be successful or not is not in my hands. I still do my job, the best I can. ~ Kate Del Castillo

Really? I love this place. We draw more power in this room than the average small town in Maryland. The spinning servers down there actually generate enough friction to reduce our heating bill by forty percent in the winter." He spread his arms and smiled. "See? Even the NSA is going green! ~ Andrew Warren

5-4-10 Tuesday 8:00 A.M.
Made a large batch of chili and spaghetti to freeze yesterday. And some walnut fudge! Relieved the electricity is still on.
It's another beautiful sunny day with fluffy white clouds drifting by. The last cloud bank looked like a dog with nursing pups.
I open the window and let in some fresh air filled with the scent of apple and plum blossoms and flowering lilacs. Feels like it's close to 70 degrees. There's a boy on a skate board being pulled along by his St. Bernard, who keeps turning around to see if his young friend is still on board.
I'm thinking of a scene still vividly displayed in my memory. I was nine years old. I cut through the country club on my way home from school and followed a narrow stream, sucking on a jawbreaker from Ben Franklins, and I had some cherry and strawberry pixie straws, and banana and vanilla taffy inside my coat pocket. The temperature was in the fifties so it almost felt like spring. There were still large patches of snow on the fairways in the shadows and the ground was soggy from the melt off.
Enthralled with the multi-layers of ice, thin sheets and tiny ice sickles gleaming under the afternoon sun, dripping, streaming into the pristine water below, running over the ribbons of green grass, forming miniature rapids and gently flowing rippling waves and all the reflections of a crystal cathedral, merging with the hidden world of a child. Seemingly endless natural sculptures.
Then th ~ Andrew Neff