Halfway through January

Now is the accepted time to make your regular annual good resolutions.

Next week you can begin paving hell with them as usual.

~Mark Twain

Yesterday my friend Joan came over to meet Baby Bear for the first time. He's almost 6 months old and this is her first visit with him. She's a single woman, close to my mother's age that I met half dozen or so years ago when she signed up for the ballet class I was teaching at the YMCA. We share a passion for dance (ballet in particular), philosophy, and savoring of the miraculous moments of life. We get together every few months to talk gratitude and hope and she is truly a bright spot in my life.


Towards the end of our afternoon, she said that she wasn't sure what her relationship would be with Baby Bear before she met him. She adores my daughter, but wasn't as sure about how things would work out with this new little person. However, now that she's met him, she's positive that they'll be friends. He seemed to enjoy her visit and even fell asleep as she held him.



We watched a dance dvd, "A Simple Man" which was by turns disturbing and hauntingly beautiful. It wasn't something I'll probably watch again...frankly, I don't like L.S. Lowry's artwork much. The best part of the entire show was a scene where a painting of the ocean was portrayed by dancers undulating like waves on the floor. This would not have been particularly effective, except that the backdrop, floor and dancers costuming & make up was all made of the same stuff pattern and at first you could not even see the dancers! No cardboard waves moving up and down on this stage! It was magnificent. I could have mostly left the rest, although it was very well produced.