I have never written about my unusual attraction to the Hippotomus. Many, many years ago, perhaps 40 or more I became attracted to hippos. I can't remember which of my hippos was first to come into my home but at some point in time I started acquiring them. When Brian was about ten he went Christmas shopping with his dad to pick out my Christmas present. Later in the day, Doc told me that he was not sure that I would like the present but Brian insisted that I would like it. I did and still do. If you've seen the new picture on my facebook space you've seen one of the hippo families that has resided in my house all of these years.That was Brian's gift.
The Hippopotamus is an ancient species, it has been around since 2000 B.C. The Egyptians feared the hippopotamus who lived in the Nile River, it was worshipped both as the evil god, Seth and as the protective goddess, Thouera. Some Egyptian kings had hippo pools. They are sometimes referred to as 'river horses'.
Throughout the years I have acquired more than a hundred of them. It came to pass that when people saw a hippo as they traveled around they would purchase it and tell me that when they saw the hippopotamus they thought of me! Does a lot for your self image!
I have a pink ceramic hippo that has lovely eye-lashes and green and yellow flowers on it (could it be a goddess?) that Linda made. I have a white one with a red top hat that unscrews and at one time had cologne in it. It is an Avon collectible bottle. I have pewter, glass, brass, clay,wooden, bone and many stuffed animals, large and small along with a variety of others.
One of the teachers that I supervised at the de Paul School traveled to Africa one Christmas vacation to visit her missionary parents. She brought me two hand carved Keesie stone hippos. One of them was carved at an old man's stand by the side of the road while she watched. I love it because one of its legs is shorter than the rest, so he is wobbly. The old man was displeased with the end result and he wanted to do another one. She assured him it would be greatly appreciated by her friend (me) and she bought it 'as is'. I love it!
Mc Donalds, during the Beanie Baby rage, sold lavender Mama and baby hippo Beanie Babies with their Happy Meals. Four or five of my students at school knew that I liked hippos, so they bought them and gave them to me. I think they are the favorites of the great-grand children and they play with them when they come to visit.
When Andrea was quite young, she and her dad were at a Patoka Lake gift shop,(I think it was a gas station) and she saw a brown hippo carved out of wood that had rolled eyes and gritted teeth and it soon had a home on my shelf. Courtney, when I was in the hospital for one of my cancer surgeries brought me a purple stuffed toy hippo with a pocket in his back, filled with shaped figures, with a velcro closure. He kept me company while I was recooperating.
I have four Hippo napkin rings, a tiny inch high fuzzy hippo key ring, Paula gave me a huge ceramic hippo that spends his summer on the deck with my shamrock plants and spends his winters in my family room, I have a 12x7 glass bank hippo that has provided me with 'eat out 'money when I travel to Florida. Angela asks, "Is the hippo ready to fly yet?" There is a hippo that perches on the rim of one of my planters, one that is a belt buckle, a very, very tiny one that I could put on a chain to wear around my neck, a Christmas hippo with a wreath around his neck,(he has a permanent home on the Spinet desk in the living room), I have a carved mama and baby that Paula got for me at a convention in Denver. (carved out of wood) I have a few stuffed hippos that reside on various shelves.
Some of them have their mouths open, some have them closed. I went to Gus's school, when he was in Kindergarten, to read to his class and I chose the book,"The Hippopotmus That Ate the Teacher." It was a big hit with his class. His teacher, by way of thanking me, gave me another "Hippo" book as a thankyou gift."
I have two picture frames that are Hippos, Gus is in one and Keith and the twins are in the other one. The twins have spent time with my hippos , also. I have a framed picture that Bridget drew for me while she was here last summer. She also made a book of "paper doll hippos". They have many outfits equipped with tabs to afix them to the animals. Her thankyou note for her Christmas present featured a couple of hippos by their watering hole, or river, enhanced by plants. She drew them because, "Grandma likes hippos."
Some time in the near future, I will go through the house and gather them all up for a "Hippopatamus convention" so to speak, and perhaps put them on face book. I have not lost my affection for them and will continue to enjoy them. I had hippo wind chimes,but they no longer can chime. (Their hangers broke, but I still have them. They are lying down hippos. I also used to have a cookie jar, I loved it, but it took a header off the refrigerator and broke into many peices. Even Doc was unhappy to see that happening. I've had a few Birthday cards with Hippos on them. It is surprising how many items feature them. I'm not the only one facinated by them.
The Louisville Zoo had a baby hippo there a few years ago but I did not get to go visit it! I really wanted to see it. I've seen them at the Chicago Zoo, and was even more facinated by them.
Have a Hippy Day. Ciao
Friday, January 21, 2011
Sunday, January 16, 2011
Reading Maketh the Man
I am going to pull my soap-box out again and comment on the latest controversy that I've been reading about in the news. In recent years we've all been chastized and called upon to change certain words and phrases and become 'more politically correct' in our speech and comments. Even the church has been required to make changes in their dialogue and expressions. I am not totally against all of the changes, because some terms and phrases are a little more refined and a little kinder. The Holy Ghost became The Holy Spirit, the 'garbage man' became a Sanitation Worker, a chairman became a chairperson, mailman a mail person. We made changes in the names we use for different nationalities: Irish are no longer Micks, Chinese are no longer Chinks,Japanese,no longer Japs, Germans, no longer Krauts.When I was growing up many of my friends were of Italian descent and the ones from Northern Italy were called Wops and the ones from Southern Italy were called Dagos. My friend used to call her big brothers Wops when she was mad at them. They frequently called other classmates, Dago or Wop depending on which part of Italy their parents were from. None of those words are used today, and that's a good thing!
If I were to write a book about my life as a child and teenager before World War ll, if the book truly reflected that time in history, I would be bound to use many of the terms that were commonly used at that time. I would relay the fact that when we walked the six blocks to our Catholic School we passed many of the students of the public school going the other way,to the public school. We had an on-going verbal exchange with them. They stayed on one side of the street and we stayed on the other as we passed each other. They chanted "cat-lickers, cat-lickers" (Catholics) and we chanted back "pot-lickers,pot-lickers" (Protestants). It was not unusual for us to play with the 'pot-lickers' after school but in that little slice of time we got great satisfaction from our name calling duel.That would not happen in today's world but it did in mine. I would have to write the actual fact to tell it like it was.
Fast forward to today's time. When we were choosing a novel for our eighth graders to read about ten years ago the other teacher and I chose "Of Mice and Men" by John Stienbeck. It is a classic that tells of an era in our history that has been read down through the years and will be read for many years to come. The values dealt with in the book are many and values that a group of eighth grade boys need to learn, compassion, empathy and duty. If you have ever read the book you may well know that the language used is in the vernacular. It is the everyday language commonly used by the itenerants of that time in the community that is being written about.
Before we went forward with our plans to read the book, we wrote a letter to each and every parent and aprized them of the profanity that we would be exposing the students to and gave them a summary of the book and our plans for telling the students how to deal with the language. The parents were asked to sign the letter and to voice their approval or dissproval of the choice of that book. We received all of the letters back, signed and approved by the parents.
We spent one whole class explaining why the author used that language and told them they were not expected to read aloud the profanities and gave them a choice of just skipping the words or using a euphemism. We were quite impressed with the euphemisms they chose. Dag-nabbit,gol-derned, dog-gonned and many others. The book lost none of its impact and they were unabashed at the end of the book to weep together with their classmates and teachers.
My soap box piece concerns the people that want to take the N-word out of Mark Twain,s book about Huckleberry Finn. Mark Twain wanted to expose the vitroil of that era in history, he wanted to emphasize the hatred,the cruelty, the ignorance of the populace at that particular time. Why can't the teachers talk with the students in advance of reading that selection and help them understand the connotation of the word "nigger'? Slave, that they want to replace the word with, carries a totally different connotation. Please let Mark Twain get his point across! It was his intent to expose the hatred and unfairness of the accepted behavior of that time in history. Do not change his words and thereby water down his intent. Ciao
If I were to write a book about my life as a child and teenager before World War ll, if the book truly reflected that time in history, I would be bound to use many of the terms that were commonly used at that time. I would relay the fact that when we walked the six blocks to our Catholic School we passed many of the students of the public school going the other way,to the public school. We had an on-going verbal exchange with them. They stayed on one side of the street and we stayed on the other as we passed each other. They chanted "cat-lickers, cat-lickers" (Catholics) and we chanted back "pot-lickers,pot-lickers" (Protestants). It was not unusual for us to play with the 'pot-lickers' after school but in that little slice of time we got great satisfaction from our name calling duel.That would not happen in today's world but it did in mine. I would have to write the actual fact to tell it like it was.
Fast forward to today's time. When we were choosing a novel for our eighth graders to read about ten years ago the other teacher and I chose "Of Mice and Men" by John Stienbeck. It is a classic that tells of an era in our history that has been read down through the years and will be read for many years to come. The values dealt with in the book are many and values that a group of eighth grade boys need to learn, compassion, empathy and duty. If you have ever read the book you may well know that the language used is in the vernacular. It is the everyday language commonly used by the itenerants of that time in the community that is being written about.
Before we went forward with our plans to read the book, we wrote a letter to each and every parent and aprized them of the profanity that we would be exposing the students to and gave them a summary of the book and our plans for telling the students how to deal with the language. The parents were asked to sign the letter and to voice their approval or dissproval of the choice of that book. We received all of the letters back, signed and approved by the parents.
We spent one whole class explaining why the author used that language and told them they were not expected to read aloud the profanities and gave them a choice of just skipping the words or using a euphemism. We were quite impressed with the euphemisms they chose. Dag-nabbit,gol-derned, dog-gonned and many others. The book lost none of its impact and they were unabashed at the end of the book to weep together with their classmates and teachers.
My soap box piece concerns the people that want to take the N-word out of Mark Twain,s book about Huckleberry Finn. Mark Twain wanted to expose the vitroil of that era in history, he wanted to emphasize the hatred,the cruelty, the ignorance of the populace at that particular time. Why can't the teachers talk with the students in advance of reading that selection and help them understand the connotation of the word "nigger'? Slave, that they want to replace the word with, carries a totally different connotation. Please let Mark Twain get his point across! It was his intent to expose the hatred and unfairness of the accepted behavior of that time in history. Do not change his words and thereby water down his intent. Ciao
Saturday, January 8, 2011
The first few centuries after the Fall of the Roman Empire are sometimes referred to as the Middle Ages. There was prevailing ignorance and barbarism at that time. Fortunately, there were forces for Culture and enlightenment throughout the period. A group of Irish monks took it upon themselves to copy, by hand, all of the classics, the gospels, and other things so that a true account of the culture that had preceded the Fall of the Roman Empire could be preserved. These accounts are called the Book of Kells and are housed in Ireland in the library of Trinity College in Dublin. I have never been as impressed as I was when I got to see these Books when I visited Ireland. They had been laboreously hand written in the script that was used at that time. It apparently took a few centuries to copy from the Ancient Greek, Latin, Germanic and even more primitive script so that we could have an account of civilization.
We are now in the era of technology and letting our children fall by the wayside when it comes to comunicating by the traditional form. Keyboarding is taking precedence over penmanship. The children are not being taught penmanship in many schools. Shockingly, some of their teachers cannot write in cursive nor can they read cursive writing. Some educators insist that we now communicate by computers and there is no need for the students or anyone else to be literate enough to communicate by hand written means.
There are many methods of cursive writing. Enough to accomodate the students with underveloped motor skills or the difficulty, at first, that the left handed person encounters. The common Palmer method, or the Zanner-Blozer method can be a little more challenging for those students but the DeNealing Method which helps the student that is less dexterous is quite satisfactory. Legible hand writing is the ultimate aim.
There is so much talk about the quality of education in this country at this time that it seems counter productive to ignore the teaching of cursive writing and to encourage the child to depend on 'Spell-check' to spell. Spelling has pretty much fallen by the wayside and now cursive writing too. We will soon become a Nation of illiterate people.
Civilized people have been hand writing letters and other documents since the monks copied manuscripts in the Middle Ages. Shakespeare and Dickens and Poe and the signers of the Constitution found a pen good enough for their achievements. We cannot afford to let our society become deteriorated because 'it takes too much time' to teach penmanship and keyboarding too.
You must be profient in cursive writing to be able to sign your own signature to your important papers, your voter registration, your driver's licence and many, many other documents. Can you imagine getting a thank you note computer generated from your grandchild,a com.gen. love letter, a computer generated...well, you get the point. Fight to bring back the penmanship and spelling lessons in schools to prevent the New Era Dark Ages! Ciao
Note:
When children cannot write cursive writing they cannot read it either!
We are now in the era of technology and letting our children fall by the wayside when it comes to comunicating by the traditional form. Keyboarding is taking precedence over penmanship. The children are not being taught penmanship in many schools. Shockingly, some of their teachers cannot write in cursive nor can they read cursive writing. Some educators insist that we now communicate by computers and there is no need for the students or anyone else to be literate enough to communicate by hand written means.
There are many methods of cursive writing. Enough to accomodate the students with underveloped motor skills or the difficulty, at first, that the left handed person encounters. The common Palmer method, or the Zanner-Blozer method can be a little more challenging for those students but the DeNealing Method which helps the student that is less dexterous is quite satisfactory. Legible hand writing is the ultimate aim.
There is so much talk about the quality of education in this country at this time that it seems counter productive to ignore the teaching of cursive writing and to encourage the child to depend on 'Spell-check' to spell. Spelling has pretty much fallen by the wayside and now cursive writing too. We will soon become a Nation of illiterate people.
Civilized people have been hand writing letters and other documents since the monks copied manuscripts in the Middle Ages. Shakespeare and Dickens and Poe and the signers of the Constitution found a pen good enough for their achievements. We cannot afford to let our society become deteriorated because 'it takes too much time' to teach penmanship and keyboarding too.
You must be profient in cursive writing to be able to sign your own signature to your important papers, your voter registration, your driver's licence and many, many other documents. Can you imagine getting a thank you note computer generated from your grandchild,a com.gen. love letter, a computer generated...well, you get the point. Fight to bring back the penmanship and spelling lessons in schools to prevent the New Era Dark Ages! Ciao
Note:
When children cannot write cursive writing they cannot read it either!
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