WYSIWYG (Random Synaptic Firings)

Coral patent leather shoes, very simple and unadorned. I wish I had taken a picture of them as they clicked past me on the train. She was wearing a neutral skirt, a sweater more terra cotta than coral, and these shoes. I don’t remember ever having seen shoes quite this color before. Just yummy.

When I get my resurrected body, with pretty toenails instead of deformed, missing, or diseased ones, I hope that we will have pretty shoes in Heaven. Can you imagine silk stockings spun by resurrected silkworms? They would never, ever get runs in them.

Please tell me that when we go Home, shaving one’s legs will no longer be necessary, either because we do not grow hair on them, or we look at them sternly and it magically falls out below the knees. [No way am I going to ask a ministering angel to wax my calves!] I am also weary of the migration of half my eyebrows down to my chin. If they would be good little lemmings and jump off once they got there, it would not be so bad.

(Just sayin’.)

When I was having one of the attorneys sign the drafts so I could mail them out, I noticed a tip jar on her desk. There was a label on the lid, and another on the side of the jar. This is a local charity that blesses abused children who are going into foster care. Check it out. I’m putting a link in the sidebar; I put my money where my mouth is and sent them a modest donation.

The first sock is done. I bound it off during the train ride home last night. I have loosely looped through the last stitch; I don’t want to make it permanent until I try it on Firstborn’s foot again. But I’ve cast on for her second sock.

Advice from the man on the train [not to be confused with Trainman]. About 15 seconds after I finished the sock, folded it, and put it in my knitting bag, I dozed off. I woke up shortly before my stop. He was sitting across the aisle, and he smiled.

“You are very tired. Busy day. You should not push so hard.”

“Very busy day, yes, but a good one.”

“You should rest sometimes. You keep busy all the time? I watched the sock, so many needles, so many little stitches. Much patience.”

“I raised five girls. That taught me patience.”

I wonder if he knew he was an angel today? I wonder if we ever really know the good we do while we are here on Earth, the handful of words dropped into stillness that reverberate in the soul?

I read two marvelous essays recently, both of which moved me to tears. I hope you will grab the Puffs and sit still for a moment, click on the links, and listen to what you hear in your heart. First, Sooz’s column from Monday. And then Anne Perry’s, which I discovered yesterday.

They tie in well with a quote from the lesson in Relief Society: “If you judge people, you have no time to love them.” (Mother Teresa). That one made me sniffle on Sunday. There is a difference between good judgment, and being judgmental. I do better some days than others. I remember the temple president in the early years of my marriage, who said as we were assembled in the chapel of the temple, that the most important four-letter word in a marriage is not love. It is kind.

And it’s not just for marriages.