Wednesday, July 1, 2009

it's a random kind of day


I was thinking today how quickly time has passed. It's already the middle of 2009 and I remembered that ten years ago I had a newborn baby boy - my Little Friend. Giving birth is a different kind of experience. I mean, a person coming out of another person? It's too crazy weird to be possible, right?

I was remembering our New Year's Eve party that we had in 1999 and how some of our friends left early that night because they were worried about the Y2K thing. Remember Y2K? They were sincerely anxious about it. I wasn't at all.

It's interesting how different we all are.

I was thinking today about something my sister-in-law wrote on Facebook - "I'll keep my eyes peeled". Isn't that bizarre? Peeled eyes? I was thinking about all the things we say that are weird like that:
  • Can I give you a hand with that?
  • Lend me your ear for a minute.
  • Follow your nose. (how can you not follow your nose?)
  • I've got your back.

Some things you just cannot take literally. Like the time my Gram was telling me about her acute heartburn and how her chest was literally on fire. Literally. And I said, "you mean figuratively" and she looked at me for a second and said of course. I remember that I wondered how many times she'd told people the story exactly the same way, insisting that her chest was literally, literally on fire, and if she now felt embarrassed about it. I remember the mental picture I had in my head of Gram and her flaming chest.

I was missing my sweet girl today and remembering this funny picture of the time when she did my Little Friend's hair up in ponytails. That shark shirt was his absolute favorite. He wore it long after he'd grown out of it but he just couldn't stand to get rid of it.

Don't you agree that my Little Friend was the cutest little kid ever? Even with ponytails?

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4 comments:

  1. gabbyJuly 2, 2009 at 4:10 AM

    Yes, of course I agree - I mean, it's obvious!
    Still is, IMO.

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  2. BobJuly 2, 2009 at 6:58 AM

    [Q] Can you enlighten me on the origin of the expression keep your eyes peeled or pealed?

    [A] It’s spelled peeled, as in peeling an apple. It derives from an old verb pill, “to plunder”, which is the root of our modern word pillage. It came to us from the Latin root pilare, meaning “to take the hair off, pluck” (closely connected with our depilate), but which also had the figurative meaning of “plunder, cheat”, almost exactly the same as the figurative meaning of our modern verbs fleece or pluck. From about the 17th century on, pill was commonly spelled peel and took on the sense of “to remove or strip” in the weakened sense of removing an outer covering, such as a fruit. The figurative sense of keeping alert, by removing any covering of the eye that might impede vision, seems to have appeared in the US about 1850.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Queen BeeJuly 2, 2009 at 7:49 AM

    Wow Bob. Nerdy.

    ReplyDelete
  4. CamiJuly 3, 2009 at 9:14 AM

    That is funny all those sayings we have, but don't really think about literally. I think some people use the word "literally" to just add some dramatic effects to the story. We all know Gram wasn't dramatic at all :)

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