No, The Cats Have Not Eaten Me....Yet

As far as I can tell, I am still alive and have not been dined on by my feline companions......I surely would have noticed if they had begin to nibble a morsel here and there, wouldn't I??.........though if they started on my toes I might not notice since it is not as easy for me to see them nowadays......

I told my friend Anne, in Devon, that I suspect the fever fried part of my brain, but I think I have enough left to blog.  That is if I can manage to adjust to blogging on my laptop whose keyboard is quite different from my PC's and seems to be equipped with an invisible key that automatically puts spaces in the middle of my words and even switches to italics at the most inopportune times.  My desktop has gone south again and I am waiting eagerly to hear from my guru hoping he can fix it or me or  both.    @#$%&** and other obscenities.

However, I will persevere  in spite of aberrant keyboards and  dyslexic fingers.  Funny......I have many reasons to be grateful to my Father, aside from having inherited his prodigious love of words and (please excuse my pride) his amazing intellect (neither thing requiring him to acknowledge my existence in order to give them to me) but the ability to touch type may be very close to the top of the list of things for which I am infinitely grateful to him.  There I was in high school at about age 16, infinitely miserable like any normal teenager, taking all sorts of artistic and intellectual subjects, working at an artistic job handpainting decorative bottles after school and weekends and never giving a thought to the  business world when one day he looked up over his newspaper, found me within his line of  vision and said something like, "you are in high school now, aren't you?".  Cautiously I admitterd that I was, not quite sure whether to confess to the crime or deny it.   He pondered a millisecond before raising the paper and uttering the significant command,  "Take typing !".......which, of course, I did at once if not sooner.

First, I will never forget the amazing moment during that course, while blindly and hopelessly following the teacher's instructions in an exercise, I noticed that my fingers had begun to type words without me.........it was almost as mind-boggling a moment as the one when I first learned to read!!  To this day I still do not understand how this skill works and why, at certain times the effect works perfectly and at other times exasperating imperfectly.  It is something like the thing about Not thinking about Elephants, I think, but I still consider it something of a miracle and no one can talk me out of that notion.  But to get back to the point, at the time I never dreamed the effect that acquiring that skill would have on my life..........the first clue came the day my Father lowered his paper again, found me in the room with him and asked, "Can you type yet?"  My timorous nod sealed my fate for the next I don't know how many years and influenced my life forever after.

Now, my Father was, at this time, an architect, engineer and building contractor with his own small construction firm.  I knew a little about the intricacies of the business but I was soon to learn more than was really necessary for any 16 year old (or almost anyone) to know.  Without going into any more detail I will simply report that in the twinkling of an eye I was drafted into typing business letters, proposals, and building specifications and was a full fledged (unrewarded and unacknowledged)  secretary to Fairway Construction Company......in my spare time of  course which involved nights and weekends.

Hmmm......as often happpens, this blog seems to have gotten out of hand......amazing how I lose control of these things once black letters begin appearing on the screen .........and the time has come when, in order to preserve my toes, I had better go and feed the cats their dinner so I am going to have to finish these wanderings down memory lane in a 2nd chapter.  Stay tuned or, as I am famous for declaring in my emails, "more later."