December 7, 2009

I finished "The Chalet School in Exile", and am now reading "The Chalet School at War" {Hardcover title: "The Chalet School Goes to It". I'm mentioning this book in a separate segment of today's post because I'm almost finished with it. ********************************************************************************** One of my favorite scenes takes place in a "Pippi Longstocking" book. Pippi and her friends, Tommy and Annika, pass a drugstore with a sign in the window that reads. DO YOU SUFFER FROM FRECKLES? After Pippi finds out what the sign says, she goes in and tells a clerk, "No, I do not suffer from freckles." The clerk responds, "But, my dear child, your face is covered with freckles!" "I know it," Pippi answers, "but I don't suffer from them. I love them." I LOVE that attitude. ***************************************************************************** Priests For Life ************************************************************************** This is taken, slightly modified, from one of my old blogs. Time to reveal something about myself. I am a middle-aged {I've never liked that expression, because to me middle-aged is half as old as one is GOING to be}single woman, still living with my mother due to a physical disability. We have separate apartments; mine is downstairs, and Mom's is upstairs. The computer is upstairs. I have poor eye-hand co-ordination, and a perceptual-motor problem. To put it as simply as possible, this means that my hands cannot copy what my eyes see. This is why I took exception, in a review on amazon.com, to something Beverly Cleary wrote in one of her books. In one of her notes to the principal, Maggie's teacher, Mrs. Leeper, writes: "Maggie is now reading cursive. I saw her reading what I had written on the chalkboard. If she can read it, she can write it." Not necessarily. There are children (and adults) with perceptual motor handicaps, poor eye-hand co-ordination, and other, often unrecognized, disabilities, who CANNOT write well, even though their reading skills may be at grade level or higher. I feel that Beverly Cleary (who has been one of my favorite authors since I was in the third grade) does a disservice to these people with this passage. I was reading at an early age, but I still can't write legibly. How many times was I scolded by my teachers who felt that since I read so well, my sloppy penmanship was due to carelessness and laziness? "She's just not trying!" My poor co-ordination also gives me a problem with my balance. I can walk all right in my own home and my own yard, where I don't have to worry about people in a hurry pushing into me. So I only go out and about if I have someone to hold on to. Another aspect of my perceptual problem is that I cannot properly judge where things are in relationship to where I am. I can see WHAT it is, but I won't be able to point to it accurately, nor can I tell what other people are pointing to. This meant that I "saw" the teacher pointing to me when, in reality, she was calling on someone else, and vice-versa. Once I was aware of this, I asked my teachers to call on me by name. I was also one of the kids other kids picked on and called "REE-tard!" I'm sure that some, at least, wish they could apologize. I have no grudge against my former schoolmates; they, like me, were just kids. I may very well have been the one MAKING fun of someone had the situation been reversed. In fact, I probably did, at one time or another, make fun of someone. Perhaps we all did it at least once. After I had become a Catholic, someone told me that Purgatory would be much worse than anything that happened to me in school. I responded, "No, I think it will be better, because it will be FAIR. I won't suffer anything I don't DESERVE in Purgartory." And as I type this, it occurs to me that Purgatory won't only be FAIR; it will be MERCIFUL, because God is merciful. I'll suffer in Purgatory much LESS than I deserve. ************************************************************************************ CURRENTLY READING "The Chalet School and Robin", by Caroline German. {juvenile fiction, school series} (This is one of the fill-in titles.) "The Art Spirit", by Robert Henri (nonfiction) "Pirkei Avos Treasury" (I prefer this to the version I started reading online, because it has commentaries, which the online version lacks.) (Judaica, nonfiction) The Rosary: Keeping Company With Jesus and Mary by Karen Edmisten {New book, published this year) ********************************************************************************8 I REALLY need more books of Rosary meditations.