#4 - A Puddle-Wonderful Feeling
It Started With a Wish; A Good Reference; Money on My Mind
Hello, my friends,
By way of introduction, I leave the painting above. Spring is here, and yet there is snow capping our San Gabriel Mountains just like it does Levitan’s Italian mountains. The trees in the picture’s foreground remind me that a cherry tree in our building’s courtyard recently dropped its blossoms. I’ve been passing it since June of 2022 when we moved here and only just realized what we had when I looked down last week and saw the heralded blossoms. Few things show us that spring is here like cherry blossoms!
It Started With a Wish
Speaking of plants, there are dandelions popping up outside of Michael’s preschool. Recently, when I was picking him up, he spotted them and asked if he could pull one out and blow the the florets off. Sure, I said, and he conscientiously huffed until its little head was bald.
“Did you make a wish?” I asked. He said he had. A moment later, it hit me: My son is old enough to have wishes! I mean, I know he has wants and I know he has needs. It’s obvious to any parent that a baby hollering for a bottle has needs and a toddler waddling after a furry dog has wants, but wishes! That requires the capacity to see into a longer future that’s different from the current reality. A wish is a precocious imaginative experience.
We have minor celebrations when kids take their first steps and say their first words. I don’t know if that moment marked Michael’s first wish (probably not), but in my mind I celebrated a little bit.
My son has reached the age of wishing!
(I didn’t ask him what his wish was and he didn’t share it. I suppose age four is also an age where privacy is realized. In school they learn to say, “I need some space,” and I gave Michael his.)
A Good Reference
One of my former colleagues at the Topanga Library sent me a message last week. She was applying for a branch manager position and would I be her reference? Of course I would! She was a hard-working, smart, and personable Library Assistant who went to library school to earn her MLIS (Master of Library and Information Science) while working full-time. Naturally, she succeeded in obtaining her degree and promoted into a librarian position. That was around when I promoted beyond that library so we both went off on new adventures. I’m sure she has been a fantastic librarian and now she’s going to become a manager!
The thing is, all those years ago when I sat across from her at my desk, I knew that she would one day sit in the manager’s chair (and I may have mentioned it once or twice). She was self-possessed and responsible, the kind of person who ends up in charge. Now, the egotistical part of me wants to take a sliver of responsibility for her achievement, but really, the truest thing I could say is simply that I was there. I knew her then, and I’m proud of her now.
Money on My Mind
You may know, since I posted it on all of my social media channels, that after something like a year, I finally finished working on my website. It didn’t actually take a year to create, but that’s another story. Anyhow, with little kids, it’s a challenge to work on more than one side project at a time, so I mostly had to neglect writing prose in favor of writing code. If you’re reading this, however, you can see that I’m back to being your normal, standard-issue writer of sentences that don’t break if you add an extra space (I was going to say semi-colon, but I was using Python not C).
Where am I going with this…Ah, yes: Before we bought our condo last year, we started working with a financial advisor in order to get our money situation squared up. He’s been very good at helping us get an overall picture of our finances and keep us focused on going to down a list of essentials for our age and affairs. Alas, now that I have a little time I’m tracking our spending, making spreadsheets, and reading books and listening to podcasts on financial independence. I have more to say on all of the above, but right now it’s really just two things:
If you have any personal finance book, blog, or podcast recommendations. Send them my way.
Apparently, I’m the type of person who enjoys both writing poetry and working with spreadsheets. I don’t understand my brain. Here’s a picture of Sophie (right) and me from 2021 looking confounded by my brain:
A Note on the Title: The “puddle-wonderful” comes from the popular E. E. Cummings poem, "[in Just-]”. You should read it!