Video: Rita Rudner – and quotes galore – coming up…!

I’d decided that I should post at least twice a week -  like most  good intentions, mine was found lacking in implementation.  Now I’ve found a way (I think) to ensure I do post regularly – like I mentioned earlier, I have a huge collection of  quotes, and I have now decided that if I cannot find anything to write about, I’ll cull some of my favorites and post those.

Here are a couple  from a  woman with awesome attitude – and a fantastic sense of  humor: American writer, actress and comedienne Rita Rudner.

“When I eventually met Mr. Right I had no idea that his first name was Always.”

“I love being married.  It’s so great to find that one special person you want to annoy for the rest of your life.”

And here is a live performance of hers you can enjoy!

© Sosha Srinivasan

Texting times

There is an upside to having poor eyesight. My vision is corrected of course, and I recently got bifocals to boot! But the resultant visual “jiggle” that I experience can cause me to read wrong or, rather, different from what it actually is meant to be… Let me illustrate:

The sentence was a cliche – “We live in testing times…” which I read as “texting”!

And hey, what do you know – I’ve got an original one liner to my credit – I googled it (with quote marks) and it isn’t there! So here it is, copyrighted and all…

We live in texting times. – Sosha Srinivasan

Whoops! I’ve blown my cover!!!

© Sosha Srinivasan

The parent-child equation – Part 2

Conversely, there are dividends: an amazing insight or an unexpected expression of love:

“A rose can say I love you,
Orchids can enthrall.
But a weed bouquet in a chubby fist -
Oh my, that says it all.”
- Barbara Johnson

If you consider yourself lucky in the kind of children you have, then you probably have children who are lucky in the kind of parents they have: you are obviously doing something right!

Here are some more lines of advice, echoing down the ages, to keep you on the right track:

“The greatest gifts you can give your children are the roots of responsibility and the wings of independence.” – Denis Waitley.

“Respect the child. Be not too much his parent. Trespass not on his solitude.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson.

“I firmly believe that doors were invented for closing, that each member of a family is entitled to be alone when he wants; that “togetherness” should be a matter of emotional rapport and not mere physical proximity.” – Sydney J. Harris.

“A good family life is never an accident, but always an achievement by those who share it.” – James Bossard.

“A good laugh is sunshine in the house.” – William Makepeace Thackeray.

“Everybody needs a hug. It changes your metabolism.” – Leo Buscaglia.

“Do not underestimate a child, or overestimate a grownup.” – Akbar Ali H. Jetha.

“The best thing you can give children, next to good habits, are good memories.” – Sydney J. Harris.

“The best time to put children to bed is whenever they’ll go.” – Dave Preston.

“The word “no” carries a lot more meaning when spoken by a parent who also knows how to say yes.” – Joyce Maynard.

“The best security blanket a child can have is parents who respect each other.” – Jan Blaustone.

There are many factors that strike at the very heart of this essential human relationship: the stressors of our fast-paced lives and the shrinking globe, depersonalization courtesy the latest advances in communication technology, cellular phones, computers and the Internet . Even so, millions of parents give it their best shot, doing what they believe is the most advantageous for their kids, making sacrifices, undergoing hardships… while trying to snatch time together in their busy lives.

Henry Ward Beecher has the last word:
“There is no friendship, no love,” he affirms, “like that of the parent for the child.”

© Sosha Srinivasan

The parent-child equation – Part 1

The universal relationship between parent and child is fraught with wild swings in emotion, running the gamut from frustration to philosophy, letting go to love – in the midst of some that defy definition.

Moira Yuill speaks for all sleep deprived new parents when she drily observes, “People who say they ’slept like a baby’ generally don’t have any.” And the new father’s woes are articulated by Imogene Fey: “A man finds out what is meant by a spitting image when he tries to feed cereal to his infant.”

Childhood is a learning experience – oftentimes more for the parent, though it may be the second or even third time around. “Having children makes you no more a parent than having a piano makes you a pianist.” contends Michael Levine. Matrimony and parenthood has its champion in Peter de Vries who emphasizes that “The value of marriage is not that adults produce children but that children produce adults.”

For the child, “Childhood is measured out by sounds and smells and sights, before the dark hour of reason grows.” according to John Betjeman. Montaigne was ahead of his time when he asserted over four hundred years ago that “… children at play are not playing about; their games should be seen at their most serious-minded activity.”

On the flip side, Susan Lewis observes, “Children don’t need toys to play. My one-year-old is never happier than when he is unraveling an audio tape, wearing underwear on his head or making music by clinking a crystal ornament against the glass coffee table. And his favorite part of birthdays and Christmas is the chance to taste so many kinds of colored wrapping paper while everyone else is distracted with whatever is inside. Even my older children don’t need toys — they are quite content reprogramming my computer, taking apart the lens of my camera or face-painting with the makeup in my bathroom. It is parents who need toys. We need toys to keep our children away from our things.”

When a parent is involved in instruction there is an added bonus; as the Talmud puts it: “When you teach your son, you teach your son’s son.”  J B Priestley reflects on the joy of a childhood relived, be it through a book, a song or an experience recounted: “To show a child what once delighted you, to find the child’s delight added to your own – this is happiness.”

This poignant feeling is expressed so well by Thomas S Jones, Jr in his evocative verse from the poem “Sometimes”:

“Across the fields of yesterday
He sometimes comes to me,
A little lad just back from play—
The lad I used to be.”

So parents would do well to empathize with their offspring as A Marcel proclaimed, “It is not for the young to understand us. It is for us to understand them. After all they cannot put themselves in our places, while we have already been in theirs.”

Some parents have have unnaturally high expectations, forgetting that, as David Elkind commented in his acclaimed work, ‘The Hurried Child‘, “… a child is an active, participating and contributing member of society from birth. Childhood isn’t a time when he is molded into a human who will then live life; he is a human who is living life. No child will miss the zest and joy of living unless these are denied him by adults who have convinced themselves that childhood is a period of preparation.”

And, as Carolyn Coats so succinctly put it, “Children have more need of models than of critics.”

Children can annoy and exasperate: “There are many questions that no man can answer and most of them are asked by 5-year-olds.” They can also cause anxious moments. Floyd R Miller speaks for the panic-stricken parent:

“Even much worse than a storm or a riot,
Is a bunch of kids who are suddenly quiet.”

Also as Ogden Nash recited:

“Children aren’t happy with nothing to ignore
And that’s what parents were created for.”

Finally at the end of an exhausting day, Ralph Waldo Emerson remarks, “There was never a child so lovely but his mother was glad to get him asleep.”

© Sosha Srinivasan

Quotations galore!

I have a huge, huge collection of quotations collected over almost three decades – I possess a copy of the Concise Oxford Dictionary of Quotations – but the most interesting are those I have jotted down over the years. I’ve managed to fill four notebooks and my guess is that the count runs into several thousands. My son says that it is a terrible method of recording anything, especially now, in the age of computers. He has been pushing me to input them on a PC. He even started a blog, publishing quotes from my collection that do not come up on Google search – rarequotes.wordpress - but it is a work in progress – getting along in fits and starts.

I often read through my collection (it’s almost scripture to me!). Recently I was struck by a common category several seemed to fall in. I got thinking – and scribbling – and here is the end result…