A close-up of the marble my dad sent me.
Yeah, a marble. Well, a glorified marble. Really, a small paperweight. But there was this thing with his brother when they were kids and something happened with marbles and my dad saw marbles in a catalog recently and was reminded of days gone by and here is my new marble.
It's really lovely and I do love glass paperweights, though can't begin to afford the ones I love most. For instance:
This is called "Caribbean Reef". Isn't that lovely? or:
"Phantom of the Sea".
"Beauty and the Beast" can be had for a mere seven hundred dollars.
Etc., etc., etc. Those last few cost a couple thousand. You get the idea. But I do love the things so when he can, my dad sends me something round and shiny and beautiful.
It's been a very weird day. I spent a couple of hours with my in-laws going over old family photos for a project I'm hard at procrastination on. The photos came with stories I had never heard, filling in gaps here and there I had either barely felt or tried very hard not to notice. Funny how much of what a family is going through gets back to where they came from, even when we are all so long gone from there.
On the way home, I did something I almost never, ever do and NEVER with a man, not since my kids were born - I offered a ride to a stranger. A stranger and his very small child, who looked lost and cold near the lake. They didn't kill me, I am glad to report, but the father was very weird and I was very glad when he got out of my car. I don't know what I was thinking, except that the little boy looked cold and alone with his little fishing pole. I rather doubt that would have been much comfort if my family had needed to identify my body. I can be so monumentally dumb sometimes.
Speaking of "Scrubs" (it's all between the lines of the little boy/weird dad story):
