Home  >> Stories  >> The Tale Spinner #2018-31

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IN THIS ISSUE

• In this Heroic Story, Romona Baker writes about kindness
• Shirley Conlon forwards the seniors´ calendar for August
• Carol Shoemaker sends a Facebook post by Dan Rather
• Catherine Nesbitt shares some idle thoughts
• Tony Lewis forwards an article about the English language
• Tom Teller suggests an interesting site

Romona Baker from Missouri writes about

WAITING IN THE DARK

My husband, Richard, and I go to rural Nicaragua as volunteers to drill water wells with an organization called Rainbow Network. Rainbow Network is a Christian ministry that provides healthcare, education, micro-business development loans, and housing for rural Nicaraguans. These people live in extreme poverty and hardship.

On one trip we worked building a small group of little houses, several miles from the nearest little town on a dirt road.

One day Richard and our interpreter took the truck into Managua to purchase more water pipe. During their absence, I simply joined eight Nicaraguans in hand digging foundations for the little concrete-block houses that would replace their dirt-floor shacks.

I communicated mostly with smiles and gestures while trying to pick out a few familiar Spanish words. I knew these people only a little. One day I´d gone with Raquel to fix lunch for her children and her sick father over a fire of sticks.

Richard planned to return in a couple hours, about 3:00 p.m. As 4:30 approached, the unfamiliar labour took its toll, and I returned to the tool shed to wait. No one wears a watch in Nicaragua because people who don´t have enough food for their children can´t afford a watch. Besides, time is less meaningful when there are more ox carts than trucks on the washed-out dirt roads.

I knew the workers would soon quit to walk home before the 6:00 p.m. darkness. As I waited, Raquel brought her shovel and sat down on the board to talk. We´d taught each other new words all day. Knowing her family awaited their supper, and with storm clouds moving across the western sky, I tried to communicate I wasn´t afraid to wait alone. Plus, I´d asked Pedro, the sixth grader we´d hired to help with drilling, to keep me company.

I began to wonder about my husband and the interpreter at the 5:30 p.m. sunset. Other workers put their tools away and sat down to "talk." As the sun set, we shared the pronunciation for words like "moon" and "stars" in Spanish and English.

By 7:00 p.m., I knew their families were waiting and perhaps worrying as I was. But they were relaxed and simply comfortable together in the darkness, seeming to enjoy the simple game of teaching me Spanish.

I´ve come to understand the gentle openness of rural Nicaraguan families. But I´d never seen them as warmly protective as they were while we passed the time until - shortly after 7:00 p.m. - headlights approached. Managua, a city of millions, is accessed via two-lane roads; the pipe-laden truck had been snarled in never-ending highway construction.

The extra hands quickly unloaded the pipe, and my gentle hosts quietly dispersed to start their walk home in the dark. I was in the midst of an endeavour to help them. Yet these beautiful, rural Nicaraguans had blessed me with the gifts of their time and graciousness.

EDITOR´S NOTE: The author refers you to: https://www.rainbownetwork.org/

E-mail subscriptions to HeroicStories are free, Sign up here: HeroicStories.org.

Shirley Conlon forwards this month´s illustration from the retirement home seniors´ calendar:

Martha Bajohr, 77

Carol Shoemaker shares a post by Dan Rather on Facebook:

OLD FRIENDS ARE GOLD

It´s been another week of craziness on the political landscape. But as the news alerts ping with rapid succession and increasing alarm, I seek a refuge. We cannot afford to bury our heads in the sand, but we also cannot succumb to the constant strain on our humanity. We must all find ways to try to keep a semblance of sanity and connection to a larger world.

So allow me, please, to respectfully and gently offer a suggestion: make the time to take an old friend to lunch. The goal need not, and perhaps should not, be to talk politics. Musings and laughter and even some harmless gossip. I´ve become partial to the Yiddish word kibitz.

This is what I did recently with my oldest friend in New York. I´ve known him, been close to him, for now well over 50 years. We talked about our families, lots about our grandchildren; also about the World Cup, the Yankees, Mets, Astros and Knicks. Then some about how great the two of us used to be when we worked together as journalists. He had a burger, I had eggs rancheros. We spent about an hour and a half together and departed with pats on the back, a hug, and promises to do it again soon - which we meant.

I was refreshed, renewed, and more "up" and optimistic about the world. Now, still in the flow of quiet reflection, I find myself thinking of a favourite saying of my late father: "New friends are silver, old friends are gold."

So if you´re feeling a little low about politics, work, and/or life in general, take an old friend to lunch.

Ed.: What a great idea!

Catherine Nesbitt shares these

IDLE THOUGHTS OF A RETIRED PERSON

I planted some bird seed. A bird came up. Now I don´t know what to feed it.

I had amnesia once - or twice.

Protons have mass? I didn´t even know they were Catholic.

All I ask is a chance to prove that money can´t make me happy.

What is a "free" gift? Aren´t all gifts free?

They told me I was gullible ... and I believed them.

Teach a child to be polite and courteous in the home and, when he grows up, he´ll never be able to merge his car onto a freeway

Two can live as cheaply as one, for half as long.

Experience is the thing you have left when everything else is gone.

What if there were no hypothetical questions?

One nice thing about egotists: They don´t talk about other people.

When the only tool you own is a hammer, every problem begins to look like a nail.

A flashlight is a case for holding dead batteries.

What was the greatest thing before sliced bread?

I used to be indecisive. Now I´m not sure.

The cost of living hasn´t affected its popularity.

How can there be self-help "groups"?

Is there another word for synonym?

Where do forest rangers go to "get away from it all"?

The speed of time is one-second per second.

Is it possible to be totally partial?

Is Marx´s tomb a communist plot?

If swimming is so good for your figure, how do you explain whales?

Show me a man with both feet firmly on the ground, and I´ll show you a man who can´t get his pants off.

It´s not an optical illusion. It just looks like one.

Is it my imagination, or do buffalo wings taste like chicken?

Tony Lewis forwards this article on

HETERONYMS

For all of you who wonder why folk from other countries have trouble with the English language, here is a clever piece put together by an English teacher, who else?

Homographs are words of like spelling but with more than one meaning. A homograph that is also pronounced differently is a heteronym. You think English is easy?

Let´s face it - English is a crazy language. There is no egg in eggplant, nor ham in hamburger; neither apple nor pine in a pineapple. English muffins weren´t invented in England or French fries in France. Sweetmeats are candies, while sweetbreads, which aren´t sweet, are meat. We take English for granted. But if we explore its paradoxes, we find that quicksand can work slowly, boxing rings are square, and a guinea pig is neither from Guinea nor is it a pig

And why is it that writers write but fingers don´t fing, grocers don´t groce, and hammers don´t ham? If the plural of tooth is teeth, why isn´t the plural of booth, beeth? One goose, two geese. So one moose, two meese? One index, two indices? Doesn´t it seem crazy that you can make amends but not one amend? If you have a bunch of odds and ends and get rid of all but one of them, what do you call it?

If teachers taught, why didn´t preachers praught? If a vegetarian eats vegetables, what does a humanitarian eat? Sometimes I think all the English speakers should be committed to an asylum for the verbally insane. In what language do people recite at a play and play at a recital? Ship by truck and send cargo by ship? Have noses that run and feet that smell? How can a slim chance and a fat chance be the same, while a wise man and a wise guy are opposites? You have to marvel at the unique lunacy of a language in which your house can burn up as it burns down, in which you fill in a form by filling it out, and in which an alarm goes off by going on.

English was invented by people, not computers, and it reflects the creativity of the human race, which, of course, is not a race at all. That is why, when the stars are out, they are visible, but when the lights are out, they are invisible.

PS. - Why doesn´t "Buick" rhyme with "quick"?

SUGGESTED WEBSITES

Tom Telfer forwards the URL for a close-up look at gardens in full bloom and the pollinators that ensure that they will endure:

From the Good News Network comes this story of a scientific study that has produced book-sized solar panels that could power a whole house:

Japanese scientists are working on finding a cure for Parkinson´s disease using "reprogrammed" stem cells:

The Sunday Family Humour site has some good jokes and articles and is well worth subscribing to: