Scrambled Footnotes Friday Round-Up

Notecards are God’s way of telling us we need to get our shit in order. Notecards are the yeast in our bread, the cement in our sidewalk, the dirt under our dead bushes, the bricks in our tower of intelligence. Simply put, notecards are the building blocks of civilization. We’d all be better off traveling about the world with a new pack of notecards and a decent pen. First, notecards have an implicit expectation that one will be brief, to the point, and single-focused. Second, notecards can be shuffled so what is last can become first. Third, notecards can be arranged on the floor, grouped and re-grouped so that patterns can be discerned and order created. Notecards are fabulous.

Footnotes are a bitch until you remember the routine. My husband wrote a book and the book has fifty footnotes and he doesn’t know how to find the little footnote button in Word nor does he remember anything about footnote formats from graduate school. But he can wield a mean pencil and he had a stack of new notecards so he created a list of footnote clues for me, some clues more obscure than others, for sure. This has made for a fun return to the world of academic protocol, a wee stroll down memory lane, recalling my desperate desire to fit in with all the smarties in the local ivory tower. Having all the accoutrements, like footnotes and other whatnot, in order was critical. It’s an if I put the napkin in my lap properly and know which fork to use for salad, I belong at the fancy table kind of thing. Gosh, that was a picky, hard time.

We had a protest on Monday which was extremely small and bordering on the eccentric. You know the groups of old people who gather on corners to hold up signs decrying the defense budget and wanting an end to the Cuba embargo? And they go there with their homemade cardboard signs that are curled at the edges from decades of use and people who drive by honk at them? The group I’m part of is beginning to feel a lot like the protesting grannies. Oddly, I don’t think I care. It gets us out and walking around while the other grannies are doing word finds. I took our group’s megaphone to the demo, even brought along an extra big box of batteries, but there was no one to shout at so it stayed in the bag.

April is a cruel month. I never used to think so. My birthday is in April and so was Easter most of the time when I was growing up so April always meant Easter baskets and new patent leather shoes for church. But I have friends who have lost children to suicide. They were spring suicides, a couple of them now several years ago. I don’t say much to my friends about their kids, I probably should, but I remember that when I heard about them, it was on days like today. The lawn is greening up, our little maple tree out front is budding, the lake has a hundred different hues of blue and green and the waves are rolling with the wind. It couldn’t be a sweeter time or a harder time, depending. I think about my friends’ dear lost people in April.

I had a chance to sling some hash this week. After fourteen months, I signed up for a volunteer slot at the Street Angels kitchen where I broke twenty-four boxes’ worth of spaghetti in half, mixed frozen meatballs and sauce with my hands, and later piled the cooked meatballs and sauce on top of one hundred small mountains of spaghetti. The volunteer next to me heaped on the green beans. It’s just a meal, you might think. What’s the big deal? Certainly, there are more important things to do for homeless people than hand them a box of spaghetti and meatballs. Maybe, but today, the mother of a man who recently lost his life on the streets told one of our founders, “Thank you for taking care of my baby – when I didn’t know where he was.” I made a notecard for this and filed it under “Purpose.”

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Here is a link to information about the prevalence of spring suicides.