Storytorch

My husband Mark and I are in Edinburgh, Scotland, in place to attend the famous Military Tattoo drum and bagpipe exhibition tomorrow night amid a crowd of 10,000. We've been up and down The Royal Mile, discovered an old monument to Robert Burns in a seemingly abandoned cemetery, and lunched at The Beehive pub near Edinburgh Castle.

Today, while enjoying paintings by Scots and others at the Royal Museum, we took a seat on a tufted velvet sofa in a ground floor gallery to give our legs a short rest. Other tourists were milling about, and Museum guards stood at their posts.

Still a bit jeg-lagged, I felt my eyelids close. Able to sleep deeply while sitting stock-still, I power napped, returning to consciousness after only five minutes or so. "Where am I?" I wondered, casting about until my eyes caught the plaid pants of a burly guard. "Oh, right, Edinburgh."

With pleasure, I recalled a short snooze I enjoyed in front of Sargent's "Madam X" at the Metropolitan Museum of Art a couple of years ago, and another on a beautiful June day sitting at a table in the Tuileries near the Louvre in Paris. Perhaps I should start a checklist of world cities where I'd like to doze impromptu.

I was probably in my 30s when I bought a pair of silvery earrings bearing "New York, Paris, Milan" in artsy script along the sides. My joy was great when I ran across them some years later, having visited, as I hoped I would, each city.

Today's Fortune Cookie Fortune:
You will relax away from home.

In the months, weeks, and days leading up to my sixtieth birthday in late June, I felt depressed. "Where has the time gone?" I kept asking myself. I chafed at the image of myself as a truly older lady.

I spent the actual event among colleagues at an advisory board meeting for the International Quilt Study Center in Lincoln, Nebraska, so I was in wonderful company. The weather, as usual in high June, was lovely, and we dined outdoors.

Now that I've crossed into my sixties I find I love my age! Sixty is the beginning of a new decade for me, so much more interesting than the end of an old one. Yoga practice has made me more agile and strong than I remember from younger years. Sixty seems more stylish than that dumpy 59.

Two books were torchbearers as I made this little transition, Somewhere Towards the End by Diana Athill, and I Feel Bad About My Neck by Nora Ephron. Athill, an editor who worked for a London publishing firm through age 70 and began writing after that, published this particular volume at 91, and had all sorts of pithy British things to say about aging. New Yorker Ephron wrote her witty essays on hair and nail maintenance and other women's issues at 60 and is now 70 and as classy as ever.

Less than a month into my sixth decade of life, I find myself quite happy, grateful, and looking forward to 70, which seems way cooler than 60, certainly better than 69.

Today's Fortune Cookie Fortune:
You will age gracefully.

Often, as I dump junk email into the Junk Email folder on my computer, I wonder about the subject lines I see.

Much like snake-oil salesman of yore hawking their wares under a tent at the local fair, cybermarketers are determined to fleece the public. We all know there's a sucker born every minute, and we're on guard to prevent being the latest foolish babe.

Two aspects of these unsolicited missives interest me: 1) poor syntax and 2) gullibility categories.

As to the quality of language, I assume the writers did not complete grade school or English is a second (or third) language. Here are some examples:

Your friend has made you and greeding card

Read or your gay

Increasing Seemen And Orgamss

Arouse in secs

Mentally, these remind me of bumper stickers placed crookedly on cars. I retort, "If you want me to vote for your candidate or cause, you're not doing him/her/it any favors by displaying a lack of attention to detail, aesthetic weakness, unfamiliarity with common practises, and general sloppiness." Credibility is key to effective marketing, at least for me.

However, when discussing spam with my youngest daughter recently, she suggested some misspellings of certain words are intentional (like "secs") in order to slip past spam blocking software. Oh, Brother.

As to gullibility, recurring product types seem to say a lot about the insecurities of the computer-owning public. Do the uneducated really think they can Get a degree with no problems? Do the overweight believe they can Lose weight without starving? Do fashionista wannabes think Less Expensive Repilica Watches Can be as Good as Original Watches?

Caveat emptor, everyone!

Today's Fortune Cookie Fortune:
You will not be interested in online gambling.

Recently, before heading for the airport, I looked on my shelves for a book to take along. The volume I selected, 30 Stories to Remember, previously belonged to my mother.

A high school English teacher and, later in her life, a small-town newspaper publisher, my mother loved the printed word. She spent the last few of her 92 years sitting in a comfy chair rereading "Of This and That," the column she wrote each week for her newspaper for twenty years.

Published by Doubleday in 1962, 30 Stories is hard-covered and about two inches thick, not the best choice to haul around airports, but it came in handy. My flights were delayed, and so I enjoyed masterpieces by authors I have read before, such as "Two Soldiers" by William Faulkner and "The Split Second" by Daphne du Maurier. I'd never heard of Karl Decker, author of "The Theft of the Mona Lisa," or Walter D. Edmonds, who wrote the very entertaining "Courtship of My Cousin Doone."

I carted my book (too thick to fit in carry-on or purse) from Iowa to Indiana, where I lectured to quilters in Shipshewana. From Indiana, my book and I flew to Lincoln, Nebraska, for a meeting of the International Quilt Study Center & Museum advisory board, on which I sit. Along the way I read "The Soldier's Peaches" by Stuart Cloete and "How We Kept Mother's Day" by Stephen Leacock.

My husband Mark drove from Iowa to Nebraska to fetch me and, once home in Winterset, I soon realized I had forgotten 30 Stories to Remember!

On Saturday my three best friends and I road-tripped to Lincoln for an overnight stay, to dine, talk, sip wine, catch up with one another, see the quilt exhibits, and bring my mother's book home.

Today's Fortune Cookie Fortune:
You will tell a story.

Our blue spruce is a magnificent 40-foot tree, 20 feet in diameter, the hands-down focal point of our Winterset back yard. So many species of bird reside in its branches my husband Mark and I call it The Apartment.

Landscaping around our dilapidated cottage in Wisconsin is fairly non-existant. Recently-trained Iowa State University Master Gardeners, Mark and I entertain ourselves frequently by considering the planting possibilties near the house, in the yard, and along the path to the lake. As rennovations on the house continue, we dream of flowers, shrubs, and trees.

On the west side of the cottage, a gravel driveway circles an unkempt, circular bed, enabling drivers to get in and out of the property without backing up. Whatever we plant at the center of this roomy, currently grass-and-weed-filled circle will be an instantly important greeter of visitors to our vacation home.

In a planning frame of mind we ask ourselves, "Flagpole?" "Cherry tree?" "Blue spruce?"

The Winterset spruce went in the ground on Father's Day almost twenty years ago. The little evergreen was shorter than my own waist; I dug the hole, watered the tree, and watched it grow. Eight or nine years later, to make room for an addition on the west side of the house, a professional tree mover relocated my tree, still under ten feet tall, to the back yard. After Mark and I married, the tree was moved ten feet further north to allow space for a garage.

"You can never move it again," commented Mr. Harvey as he climbed back on his tractor.

Mark and I admire The Apartment from the back yard deck, amazed that so large a living thing was ever small, that it ever could have been moved. Gradually, the lawn around the tree has shrunk; a pathway just wide enough for the lawnmower now remains between the tree's lower branches and the deck's edge.

"I've got it," I said to Mark one day. "If we plant a blue spruce just like this one, there will be lots of room around it for perinneals and annuals. By the time we get too old to weed the flower bed, the tree will have taken up the entire space."

Today's Fortune Cookie Fortune:
You will do long-range planning.