10 January 2009

Joining Dixie in Repetition

"She was both girl and woman."
Mark Twain describing his wife as a bride.
In today's post, Dixie refers to some repetition in the campaign pictures for Len's candidacy. I've always said (and really said it, too, not just quietly believed it) that repetition is a good teacher. A fellow playing an English professor in an old film called The Way We Were once said, "I think we learn best from that which is good." He then chose a short story written by an insensitive, beer swilling jock to read to the class. Others, like Katie, Barbara Streisand's character, were at first outraged that they had put their hearts and souls into writing their stories and here this guy who had lettered in every sport and attended only half the classes was being acknowledged as the best writer in an English composition class.


But then they listened to his story. By the end of it, Katie was ready to throw hers away and to fall completely in love with a young man she had considered beneath her until one hour before. She encouraged him, promoted his writing, recontacted him during the war, married him, had a child with him, and eventually lost him to a woman with a shockingly beautiful face and not much else going for her.


Sometimes we do that. We're going along, striving to do our best, when quite to our own surprise, we succeed! We've been trying so hard for so long that when success happens, we hardly recognize it. When Zach and Dixie (The One True Dix) got married last year I was taking pictures of everything that moved and many that didn't. Little girls gravitated to Dixie, probably because she was the closest and most recent example of what they wanted to be some day. They followed her around like puppies and she was as patient with them as you would expect a Humphries girl to be.

Lesser brides might have lost patience with them or tried to trick them into going away, but she bent down to talk with them, actually listened to what they said, and even gave one-on-one attention to them while she ate her lunch of pizza under the protective cover of a black garbage bag. She is "the One True Dix." All these little people will benefit from the time they spend with her and her good husband. I'll close with another few photos of that great day.




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My Favorite Books & Authors

  • Dale Brown
  • Mark Twain
  • Charles Dickens
  • Speeches both Historical and Hysterical
  • Damon Runyon
  • Jan Karon Mitford Novels
  • Clive Cussler
  • Tom Clancy Novels
  • Harry Potter
  • The Works of Ernest Thompson Seton