Leftover entertainments and brief reports

This will be a short post devoted to a few leftover entertainments and brief reports. After that I’ll be taking off for New Mexico for a week where I’m sure I’ll suffer horribly from the heat and waves and waves of dust,  and have all sorts of archaeological adventures.

Once again, I don’t quite know how to leave my blog untended. I don’t know what I think would happen if I left it hanging here by itself for a while. I know I’m afraid it would be difficult to find my readers again. At any rate, I’m going to fill the space with some fiction. A short story every other day (or as close to that schedule as I can manage). I hope you’ll read them; none of them are terribly long; all of them are lively and, I think, possibly, both entertaining and edifying.

Now, for the reports. A few days ago I happened to be listening to the car radio when Dr. Dean Edell talked about a survey that asked the question: At what age were you happiest? The answer was a wonderful surprise to me: it was 74 years of age. I’m not even there yet!!!

The other thing I wanted to call everyone’s attention to is a story in the July/August issue of AARP magazine. If you’re too young and never see “the world’s largest circulation magazine,” look at the online edition. The story is about Margaret Cosgrove, an eccentric New Yorker, who at age 81 has been painting for 30 years, and was just given her first gallery show. Until 2008, no one, literally no one, had ever seen her work. The neighbor who “discovered” the work and helped bring her to our attention has written a charming article about her. Unfortunately, we only see bits and pieces of what she’s painted—but what a beginning!

On to the entertainments: first, three more flower paintings with botanical descriptions from Sally Levy. These are from the “Every town has a Pearl Street” series.

And finally, from Voices and Faces, the Brownington kids book in our last post, a cartoon from the chapter on “finding our inner voice.”