I have spent the day reading so that I can keep my mind off my hopes about my Maytag washer repair and wind up jinxing myself. What I read was just an airhead book. That is the one thing I don’t fancy about my Kindle; I cannot read a bit and then think, okay, airhead, turn to the back and check out the plot suspicions and then toss it.

Technically, you can “Go To” chapters in the book and so skip ahead, but it’s not the same as flipping to last few pages and just skimming, and then maybe taking a stab at the middle to see if there’s anything else. I have the same sort of yearning for the old card catalogue in the library. You could just stand there and let the cards flip past, your eyes focusing on spotting something that says try this one. I think it must have something to do with my age, but I just felt more connected when I was rummaging through a drawer.

Well, actually, these are kind of airhead paragraphs, so I hope you just scrolled right now, skimming to see if any great secret was going to be revealed, since, obviously, the writing is pulpy.

However, now that I my mind is on Kindles, I have a question, which I suppose I will pose to Google when I leave here. When the Kindle tells you the reading time before you begin a book, is it based on your reading rate or a time calculated from a group of readers? A lot of times, when I am reading a well-written book, I will read passages over and over again; I can tell those spots in the book by the way the pages become dingy and wrinkled. Yeah, I can highlight in the Kindle, but I don’t. It’s just not the same.

And sometimes I like to just glance at a shelf and see those books that contain prose that is almost poetry – books like The Tender Bar and A River Runs Through It, to mention just two. And then, of course, there are those books that have just a single great sentence and that is enough. The Bridges of Madison County comes to mind; the movie was better, but oh, how I loved the opening sentence:

There are songs that come free from the blue-eyed grass, from the dust of a thousand country roads.

I don’t wear Grandma’s ring all the time; I don’t want to lose it or subject it to harsh chemicals – as if I would ever clean. But there are times when I want to feel my grandma with me, because it is comforting and because when I am wearing her ring, I feel like I should try a little harder to be a decent person.

Of course, you know the ring is the turquoise thing and the white spots on my hand are vitiligo. The ring looks the same, summer or winter, but my hand come July will appear to be an abstract impression of a Guernsey cow.

Cow picture from HERE.

I wore it yesterday because I had to meet with this – aw, don’t mince words, AmeliaJake, – this BIMBO and I wanted to keep my sarcastic tendencies in check. Well, I got through that, mainly by saying only two sentences and then went about everything else.

About an hour ago, I looked down and it was gone – the ring, that is. Oh, my gosh, the PANIC. Finally, I sat down and thought, “Now, Grandma, please help me find it.” I thought it through and came up with a memory of doing something messy and putting it in a zippered free gift Estee Lauder pouch – circular, purple and pink since I’m being detailed in this recounting of my hyperventilating “the sky has fallen” mood – and then stashing it in the top drawer of a china cabinet.

There is a picture somewhere of me and Grandma standing on the front yard just before going to Sunday School. She is holding my hand: I am four or five: the ring is visible on her hand. I’m a bit older now, but I can still feel that morning air and the softness of her hand. I think I can also remember not being that enthusiastic about going to Sunday School.

Memories are such wonderful things. You can compress them in your mind and then take them out and wrap them around you like a comforting blanket and they can seem as if the moment is still here.