Wear and tears

I came across this quotation when I was looking for a chapter that Robert Fulghum wrote about crayons. Bill Watterson’s quotation isn’t cheery, but then, his creations—Calvin and Hobbes—aren’t cheery, either; they’re wry and memorable and true.

"A box of new crayons!  Now they're all pointy, lined up in order, bright and perfect. Soon they'll be a bunch of ground down, rounded, indistinguishable stumps, missing their wrappers and smudged with other colors.  Sometimes life seems unbearably tragic."

~Bill Watterson

Keep in mind the fate of the Velveteen Rabbit, who had 
his fur and his features loved off.  Was he more beautiful in love-crumpled disarray or when he was fuzzy-new and 
bright-eyed?

Green haze

Just as spring arrives on the calendar, the beginnings of what will become leaves appear as a kind of tender-green haze around bushes and trees and other branches. The leaves don’t appear to be attached, but rather, floating like a veil around the branches. 

Tiberius

On March 27, 2010, Oliver William Boyle was born to my son Chris and his wife, Colleen. That was the day I found out that the baby boy whose birth we'd been awaiting would be called Oliver. It's a good name. A strong name. But it's not what my husband, younger son and I had been calling him. To us throughout most of the prenatal period, he was Tiberius.

When Chris and Colleen had decided to keep the name a secret, we needed something to call the baby-to-be. So his uncle-to-be suggested the middle name of Star Trek's James T. Kirk: Tiberius. And it stuck.

It's quite possible that Oliver will still be Tiberius to some of us when he's old enough to find it annoying.


(Photo: Tiberius with his Uncle John Michael)