Today’s guest post comes from Sherrilee

I am a reader. Many things define my life; I am a single mother, an organizer, a cook, a friend. But at my core, I am a reader. I read every day and I spend more time than you can imagine keeping track of what I’m reading, what I have out from the library, what I have requested from the library. If I could figure out a way to have someone else pay the bills, shovel the snow, cut the grass and buy the groceries, I would be perfectly content to spend my days reading. On the sofa, laying in the hammock or sitting on a park bench – all wonderful places to read.

I used to have to finish any book I started. For years it plagued me that I had started Ulysses after my freshman year in college and had never been able to plow through it. While I still struggle through a few books, these days a book has to grab me pretty quickly. There have been books that I give up on after just a few pages and occasionally there is a book that I abandon half way through because I realize I’m just not enjoying it.

This past week I reread “The Earth Abides” by George Stewart. I read this book back in high school at the suggestion of one of my favorite teachers and it was the first “science fiction” that I recall reading. Ideas from it have stuck with me over the years, so when I noticed on the library website that a new edition has been rereleased, I checked it out. Not only did I enjoy it greatly after all these years, but it struck me on a more emotional level than I remember from first reading it and I cried towards the end.

There have been many books over the years that have made me cry. When I was in the 8th grade, I read “Flowers for Algernon”. I couldn’t put it down and started to cry early on, when it was clear what direction the story was going. I read until 4 in the morning and cried until I could hardly breathe and thought I might throw up.

“Doctor Zhivago” was another one. I had already seen the movie before I read the book and was unprepared for the emotion of Pasternak’s words. I cried for an hour.

So I’ve been thinking about the difference in books – why some grab you and why some don’t. A few years ago one of my book clubs read a book about 4 brothers and was filled with baseball and baseball analogies. All the other members of the club relished it from beginning to end and I had to work hard to get through it; every time the author started to bring baseball to the page, I started to glaze over. And I have a friend who cannot understand why anybody reads anything by Jasper Fforde, who is one of my favorite authors.

Even though the tears stuff me up and made my eyes puffy and read, I consider crying over a good book a great cathartic experience and I look forward to the next “cryer”.

When have words on a page affected you physically?

Today’s guest post comes from Sherrilee

My Samoyed is named for Thorin Oakenshield, the king of the Dwarves from “The Hobbit”.

He was a rescue dog and came with two names. His first family named him Angel and his second family changed it slightly to “Aingie”. Ick. We didn’t even make it home from St. Paul with him before we knew we couldn’t live with either one of those names. Since “The Hobbit” was one of the very first fantasy/science fiction books that I ever read, we decided that would be a good place to troll for names.

Although we think Thorin is a great name, I do have to explain it to almost everyone.

Thorin is a very sweet boy but not the brightest bulb on the tree. He has allergies in the summer that lead to eye and ear sensitivities and he has an insatiable appetite for paper stuff. He loves tissues, toilet paper rolls and anything that finds its way to the floor, even empty boxes. He’s also sampled books. If you ever need to know how much the library charges for a destroyed book, just ask me. He once ate a scrapbook.

Online descriptions of Thorin, the character, paint him as “officious” and “greedy”.

These two words may not be enough to capture the literary Thorin, but they do describe my canine Oakenshield.

Officious? My Thorin has a tattle-tale bark. It is completely different from any of his other barks and yowls. If one of the other animals is getting into something, he barks his special bark to let us know the rules are being broken. When my other dog got up on the counter and was eating the chocolate chip cookies off the wax paper, Thorin barked. When the kitties got into a bag of cat food on the buffet, he barked.

Greedy? Oh yes. If the spoils are being shared with him, you don’t hear a peep. Obviously this goes against his tattletale urge. Over the years, Thorin has quietly shared banana bread, dog treats, devilled eggs and recently an entire jar of sauerkraut.

Two possible explanations.

1. When his mouth is full, Thorin chooses eating over barking.
2. Thorin’s silence is for sale.

What would it take to buy your silence when others are doing wrong?

Today’s guest post comes from Sherrilee.

I’ve always been a go-getter, as my mother would say. If I want something, I figure out a way to get it and if I’m doing something, I like to do the best job I can.

As my middle sister discovered early on, this is a difficult personality trait to have in an older sibling. As I had two years on her, everything she did or tried had already been done by me. After a few years it became clear to my parents that there were things she didn’t want to try because I was already doing them (piano, dance, reading…)

So when she showed an interest in drawing and painting, my parents really encouraged her and DIScouraged me. She got art lessons, she got art supplies, she got her artwork framed all over the house, I got bupkis. To their credit, I don’t think they were trying to discourage me in their efforts to nurture something that was all hers, but the result was the same. As the years went by we were more and more defined this way; I was the smart one and she was the artsy one.

In college, during a particularly rough semester, I was looking for something that would be easy and decided to take a beginning drawing class. It was a shock to my system that I wasn’t too bad and I had a great time in class.

After that it was as if a huge door opened for me. It seemed as if around every corner, there was another artsy-craftsy experience waiting for me. Since then I’ve taken on Ukrainian eggs, rubber stamping, tie-dye, silk screen, sewing, scrapbooking, glass etching, candle making…. it’s a long list. The teenager and I now make most of our gifts and I do cards galore every year.

In a bizarre twist, my sister decided in college that she “didn’t have time for art”. So now I’m the artsy one!

What passion have you discovered later in life?

Today’s guest blog comes from Sherrilee.

As many of us on the Trail have discussed before, as we get older, it’s an interesting phenomenon that information that used to be part of our cultural lexicon has passed out of usage. As the mother of a teenager I am constantly reminded that the younger generation doesn’t have the same cultural knowledge that my generation has.

When I was a kid, Lucretia Borgia was well-known as famous poisoner. I didn’t know much more about her except that she had lived in the olden days and wore a big ring that opened up to deliver deadly poisons to her enemies. In fact, I remember a Charlie Chan movie, Castle in the Desert, in which the femme fatale was a descendant of Lucretia and had inherited the venomous ring (which, of course, was the murder weapon). I have since read up and learned that poor Lucretia Borgia was greatly maligned and probably didn’t do any of the dastardly things that used to be “common knowledge” about her, although her father and brother were certainly very poor role models for anything remotely resembling nice guys.

Although she was born out of wedlock, her father, Pope Alexander IV, didn’t hesitate to use her for his political gain. He married her off repeatedly to political allies beginning at a young age. Then when the political winds shifted, he and her older brother Cesare arranged various endings for those marriages (annullment and murder topping the list). Her final marriage survived her father’s ambitions (and life) and she lived the remainder of her life in Ferrara. She died from complications of childbirth in 1513.

She was just thirty-nine

In my job, I arrange a lot of functions in hotels throughout the world – welcome receptions, breakfasts, theme parties, meetings. About 10 years ago, I was working with the Westin St. Francis in San Francisco and arranging the final night dinner for a small group. In discussing the evening, I asked where my event was scheduled and my contact replied “in the Borgia Room”. We finished our conversation but as I hung up the phone, I turned to one of my co-workers and laughed… “I’m not sure if I were one of my participants, I would want to have my final night dinner in the Borgia Room.”

My co-worker, who is not that much younger than I am, looked at me blankly. Not only did she not get my joke, but when I explained who Lucretia Borgia, it didn’t even ring a bell. I went on a small surveying trip around my department and with the exception of my boss, no one had heard of Lucretia Borgia. I was dumbfounded to realize that something I assumed was common knowledge was NOT.

My group’s dinner went off without a hitch and no one seemed concerned about eating a meal in the Borgia Room. But I have never forgotten it!

What things used to be common knowledge in your world, but aren’t anymore?