Spring and happiness go together, don't they?

March 20th is the first day of spring in my part of the world, the time of year when night and day are of equal length.  Today is also the International Day of Happiness.  How can you celebrate?  Maybe call a friend to chat, or even better, get together.  People all over the world will be celebrating this day.  It's a time to cultivate happiness and connection.

Looking for a happy illustration, I found these three characters.  They are doing some sort of happy dance, aren't they?  Can you name all three?  (Names below.)

Today's happy dance is brought to us

by Lucy, Snoopy, and Sally.  We miss

you, Charlie Brown, Linus, Woodstock,

and Schroeder with your piano.  (Oh, wait,

do I hear a happy tune in the background?)

Quiddity is today's word

quiddity (ˈkwɪdəti), quiddities (noun) =  (1) the essential quality of a person or thing; (2) a distinctive feature; a peculiarity.  Example:  My quirks and quiddities make me unique.  (I found the illustration HERE, to give credit to the artist.)

St. Patrick's Day

My friends Marilyn and Donna celebrating St. Patrick's Day in 2015 in the Circle@Crown Café.  Notice they are wearing green.  Neither of them is still with us, but today (reminded by this photo) I'll think of them and St. Patrick, patron saint of Ireland, who is said to have died on March 17 around 493 A.D.

Let me end this blog post with a bit of humor:  "A best friend is like a four-leaf clover:  hard to find and lucky to have."

Please don't let the word "philosophy" keep you from reading this post

Philosophy 101: From Plato and Socrates to Ethics and Metaphysics, an Essential Primer on the History of Thought ~ by Paul Kleinman, 2013, philosophy, 288 pages

A reviewer wrote that this books takes you "on a journey through the development of human intellectual thought from several hundred years B.C. to present."  That's a fair summary.  Since philosophy was part of my double major in college, I smiled when I saw that someone had donated this little book to the Crown Center library.  I'll probably read it before shelving it (or trading it for fiction, which people living here are likely to read).  Hey, I see The Thinker musing in the top right corner.

Week in Review

• On Monday, I mused about walking to the store for groceries, HERE.
• On Tuesday, I wrote about a book I had decided to re-read, HERE.
• On Wednesday, my subject was a novel set in Egypt, HERE.
• My Thursday Thoughts were about the massive piles of books donated to the Crown Center library that are currently piled up in my apartment, HERE.
• My Book Beginning for Friday was from a novel about swimmers, HERE.
• Saturday was Pi Day, pronounced Pie Day, so I mentioned both fruit pies and pizza pie, HERE.  I am certain some of you who read this will remember "pi equals 3.14" from your math class and say, "Philosophy and now math?"

is hosted by Deb at Readerbuzz.

Today is Pi Day

What is Pi Day?  I first learned that Pi equals 3.14 (with a longer string of numbers, if you are really interested) when I was a youngster in school in the 1950s.  The day itself dates to 1988, though, when (according to what I found online) "physicist Larry Shaw began celebrations at the Exploratorium science museum in San Francisco."

But it was 2009 when Congress designated every March 14 to be a holiday.  Why?  I read somewhere that someone hoped it would spur more interest in math and science.  Today, I read that it is, fittingly enough, also Albert Einstein’s birthday and (get this!) also the day that Stephen Hawking died.  I'd say they are probably the two biggest names in math and science most of us could come up with.

So celebrate by eating a piece of pie.  It could be a slice of pie like those above or, if you want to be different, it could be a slice of pizza pie.  I want pepperoni.

Beginning ~ with the people at the pool

Beginning

The pool is located deep undergrounw, in a large cavernous chammber many feet beneath the streets of our town.  Some of us come here because we are injured, and need to heal.  We suffer from bad backs, fallen arches, shattered dreams, brokwn hearts, anxiety, melancholia anhedonia, the usual aboveground afflictions.  Others of us are employed at the college nearby and prefer to take our lunch breaks down below, in the waters, far away from the harsh glares of our colleagues and screens.

The Swimmers ~ by Julie Otsuka, 2022, literary fiction, 192 pages

From the award-winning author of The Buddha in the Attic and When the Emperor Was Divine comes a novel that "starts as a catalogue of spoken and unspoken rules for swimmers at an aquatic center but unfolds into a powerful story of a mother’s dementia and her daughter’s love" (The Washington Post).

The swimmers are unknown to one another except through their private routines (slow lane, medium lane, fast lane) and the solace each takes in their morning or afternoon laps.  When a crack appears at the bottom of the pool, they are cast out into an unforgiving world without comfort or relief.

 

One of these swimmers is Alice, who is slowly losing her memory.  For Alice, the pool was a final stand against the darkness of her encroaching dementia.  Without the fellowship of other swimmers and the routine of her daily laps she is plunged into dislocation and chaos, swept into memories of her childhood and the Japanese American incarceration camp in which she spent the war.  Alice's estranged daughter, reentering her mother's life too late, witnesses her stark and devastating decline.

One reviewer wrote:  "As the book progresses, I found [the crack at the bottom of the pool to be] a clear metaphor for the beginning of Alice's demise, the crack in her mind so to speak."  Now I'm into the book and enjoying it so far.

Gilion at Rose City Reader hosts

Book Beginnings on Fridays.

Thinking about books, as usual

I'm thinking about the million donated books that have piled up on my table in the kitchen.  Well, maybe not quite a million, but more than a thousand.  Why?  Because when people die, their relatives often donate their books to our little library.  Since I am currently the only librarian working here (for free, as in volunteering my time), it means people (even current residents) often ask me how they can donate books.  During our recent renovation of the library, no books were being processed.  And we (including me) had no access.  So I ended up collecting them on my table (make that plural, as in tables).  And on the floor around the table.  And in boxes under the table.  And taking up part of my desk top.  I can barely move, folks!