A forgotten thermos, a fully-covered talker, and expository writing in an epistolary novel…

~Thursday~  I was tired this morning. If I could’ve stayed in the bed, I most certainly would have. When I went to make my coffee, breakfast, and lunch to take to work, I realized I’d left my thermos at work yesterday, so that sucked.

Since I’d bought some King’s Hawaiian rolls, I made two “sausage biscuits” with them for breakfast, and three little ham sandwiches for lunch.

Once again, I drove to the Avent Ferry Park & Ride. There were only six people on the bus, myself included, and no one studying. In fact, it looked like maybe only three of them were students.

At about two stops from the stop at which I depart the bus, this good-looking guy got on whose crotch of his pants was totally ripped open. When he sat down across from me, he put his hands between his legs for obvious reasons. Not that I was looking, but he had on red and white paisley boxers.


I had a busy day at work, which included my weekly meeting over at the Avent Ferry Technology Center, to which I rode with my boss’s boss, along with two other people—Franklin and Chris.

It was a big meeting today, as two teams have been conflated, which for a number of the participants reduces their number of weekly meetings by one. Although I’ve never “officially” been assigned to take the minutes of the meeting, I do, and really, I don’t mind. It helps me to stay focused on the meeting.

I walked over to the credit union to deposit a check during lunch, and on the way, I passed a woman who was in full cover—with only her eyes exposed—and it looked like she was talking to herself. I could see her lips moving behind the black cover over her mouth. I looked for a Bluetooth bump near her ear, but couldn’t discern one.

On my return trip, she had taken a seat on the steps by the bus stop, and I caught one sentence of her conversation as I walked by: “Let me tell you what happened.” But, still within earshot of her for about 15 more seconds, she didn’t continue. Clearly, the person on the other end was not yet ready to let her tell what had happened.

At the end of my work day, as I was was waiting to cross the street to catch the bus home, my colleague and friend David Ladrie called to me from his car at the nearby intersection, “You want a ride?” I take this as one of those “implicit affirmations,” as I didn’t see him, so he could have more easily not done that than to have done it. And clearly, if it was someone whom he didn’t particularly care for, he wouldn’t have.


I made the “fixin’s” for my deviled eggs tonight, which is to say that I hard-boiled a dozen eggs, let them cool, sliced them, removed the yolks and made them into the filling.

I stopped short of actually using the Easy Accent Decorator to finish them off. I’m going to do that tomorrow.


I read some more of that epistolary novel, The Color Purple, tonight, during which I came across a chapter that if I were teaching writing I would use as a quintessential example of expository writing.

Expository writing is the fancy shmancy name for what you’ve probably heard a writing teacher say at some point: “Show, don’t tell, with your writing.” Here’s that perfect example of it:

Dear God,

Just when I was bout to call out that I was coming in the yard, I hear something crash. It come from inside the house, so I run up on the porch. The two children be making mud pies on the edge of the creek, they don’t even look up.

I open the door cautious, thinking bout robbers and murderers. Horsethieves and hants. But it Harpo and Sofia. They fighting like two mens. Every piece of furniture they got is turned over. Every plate look like it broke. The looking glass hang crooked, the curtains torn. The bed look like the stuffing pulled out. They don’t notice. They fight. He try to slap her. What he do that for? She reach down and grab a piece of stove wood and whack him cross the eyes. He punch her in the stomach, she double over groaning but come up with both hands lock right under his privates. He roll on the floor. He grab her dress tail and pull. She stand there in her slip. She never blink a eye. He hump up to put a hammer lock under the chin, she throw him over her back. He fall bam up gainst the stove.

I don’t know how long this been going on. I don’t know when they spect to conclude. I ease on back out, wave to the children by the creek, walk back on up home.

Saturday morning early, us hear the wagon. Harpo, Sofia, the two babies be going off for the week-end, to visit Sofia sister.

The book certainly has become easier to read now that I’m “into the rhythm” of the dialect, and parts of it are resonating with flashbacks to the movie.

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