Gratitude, Three Times Seven, #2

"You're never too old to learn," someone said to me, probably someone who was about to deliver a painful lesson.  But the point was well taken.  You know the old expression attributed to Mark Twain: "When I was sixteen, my father was the stupidest man I ever met.  Now, five years later, I'm amazed at how much the man has learned."  When we're sixteen, sure, we think we know everything.  That sort of youthful zest and zeal sounds like an Italian salad: Bravado à la Braggadocio,  but we need it to deal with being sixteen.  Face it, the time you're in your late 40s, you don't have to worry about zits or having your voice crack, so you can settle down a little.  This summer,  I learned lessons about mourning, lessons that I should have learned earlier in life, I suppose, but "what's learned last is learned best," as Ralph Waldo Emerson never said.   What Pastor Bruce Wilson said at my dear Deanna's funeral got past the veil of tears I wore.  He told us that her work on earth was done, admittedly much sooner that we would have liked or expected, but she wouldn't trade places and come back from the Kingdom of Heaven for anything.  Glory be, she has reached the mountaintop, and no matter what I used to think, I'm grateful to have learned to appreciate a loss in a new way. 

I put a picture in every blog entry.  This place has
nothing to do with anything in this page today, but if
 you ever find yourself a) hungry and b) in Lusby,
 Maryland, may I suggest the Frying Pan Restaurant? 

And I'm grateful that a wonderful woman named Holly Jackson happened to read my blog entry about an odd woman who taught me and a whole roomful of baby boomers in third grade. Holly had just been to an estate sale of the belongings of a woman with the same name. Was she the same woman? We don't know. But Holly wrote to me and therefrom sprang a friendship which, not even a year old, has already seen us share ineffable loss and sweet joy in dizzying turns of fate. 

And I am grateful for the online Merriam-Webster dictionary . which reliably informs me that the word "therefrom" is, indeed, a word, but it is archaic, along with most of my vocabulary. Consarn it all!